Every era has invented a different idea of the 'classical' to create its own identity. Thus the 'classical' does not concern only the past: it is also concerned with the present and a vision of the future.

In this elegant new book, Salvatore Settis traces the ways in which we have related to our 'classical' past, starting with post-modern American skyscrapers and working his way back through our cultural history to the attitudes of the Greeks and Romans themselves.


Settis argues that this obsession with cultural decay, ruins and a 'classical' past is...

This book is a brilliant account of medieval and early modern attitudes to the cosmos in general and the human body in particular, written by one of the foremost historians of folklore and popular beliefs in Europe today.

Audiovisual culture often privileges the instantly identifiable: the recognizable face, the well-timed stunt, the perfectly synchronized line of dialogue. Yet order and clarity do not come 'naturally' to the moving image. Light, motion, definition, compression: the conditions of recording, storing and screening can subject audiovisual media to countless variations, pulling them towards the indefinite and illegible. Filmmakers and artists often seek out and work with the resulting uncertainty, from the warping of space to the melding of senses, from glare to shadow and blur to glitch.
This...

Looks at the political and social history of the Gold Coast in West Africa from the early 16th century to the second half of the 18th. The book examines how political entities in Nzema were structured territorially, as well as the formation of ruling groups and aspects of their political, economic, and military actions.