Cities, at their best, are cradles of diversity, opportunity, and citizenship. Why, then, do so many cities today seem scarred by divisions separating the powerful and privileged from the victims of deprivation and injustice? What is it like to live on the wrong side of the divide in Paris, London, New York, Sao Paolo, and other cities all over the world?
In this book, based on the internationally renowned Oxford Amnesty Lectures, eight leading urban thinkers argue about why divisions arise in cities and about what could and should be done to bring those divisions to an end. The book...

Shakespeare's works do not embody any doctrine or set of beliefs, as his critics have long been tempted to suggest, but they do stage encounters with certain kinds of thinking - ethical, political, epistemological, even metaphysical - that still concern us today. They can be shown to draw on ancient philosophies - Platonism, Stoicism, Scepticism - either directly or through medieval and continental Renaissance thought. Or their scenarios can be likened to those of other kinds of intellectual argument, such as legal or theological discourse. The essays collected in this volume demonstrate the...

What is the je-ne-sais-quoi, if it is indeed something at all, and how can it be put into words? In addressing these questions, Richard Scholar offers the first full-length study of the je-ne-sais-quoi and its fortunes in early modern Europe. He examines the expression's rise and fall as a noun and as a topic of philosophical and literary debate, its cluster of meanings, and the scattered traces of its "pre-history." Placing major writers of the period such as Montaigne, Shakespeare, Descartes, Corneille, and Pascal alongside some of their lesser-known contemporaries, Scholar argues that the...

Why read Montaigne today? Richard Scholar argues that Montaigne, whose essays were read by Shakespeare and remain a landmark of European culture, is above all a masterful exponent of the art of free-thinking. Montaigne invites his readers to follow the twists and turns of his mind, and challenges them to embark on an inner adventure of their own. Free-thinking is an art every bit as difficult to practice today as it was in sixteenth-century France, but it remains equally crucial to a fulfilled life and to a healthy body politic, and Montaigne offers his readers a master-class in that art.

We know a great deal of what Michel de Montaigne (1533-92), Shakespeare s near-contemporary and fellow literary mastermind, thinks. We know, because he tells us on page after page of his Essais, which have marked literature and thought since the European Renaissance and remain to this day compelling reading. It might seem surprising, with this wealth of evidence at hand, that Montaigne could prove so elusive in his thinking. Yet elusive he proves, as volatile as he is voluble. What, we are left wondering, does all that thinking amount to? How is it to be understood? And what value...

If the past is indeed a foreign country, then how can we make sense of its richness and difference, without approaching it on our terms alone? Pre-histories and afterlives, methods that have emerged in recent work by Terence Cave, offer new ways of shaping the stories we tell of the past and the analyses we offer. In this volume, distinguished contributors engage in a dialogue with these two new critical methods, exploring their uses in a range of contexts, disciplines, languages and periods. The contributors are Terence Cave, Marian Hobson, Anna Holland, Neil Kenny, Mary McKinley, Richard...

Caribbean Globalizations explores the relations between globalization and the Caribbean since 1492, when Columbus first arrived in the region, to the present day. It aims to help change prevalent ways of thinking, not only about the Caribbean archipelago as a complex field of historical enquiry and cultural production, but also about the nature of globalization. It argues that the region has long been - and remains - a theatre of conflict between, as well as a site of emergence for, different forms of globalization. It thereby offers the opportunity to focus research and debate across the...