Essais & Culture

In 1933, aged eighteen, Patrick Leigh Fermor set out on his 'great trudge', a year-long journey by foot from the Hook of Holland to Istanbul. Three decades later he wrote A Time of Gifts, the sparklingly original account of the first part of this youthful adventure, which took him through the Low Countries, up the Rhine, through Germany, down the Danube, through Austria and Czechoslovakia, and as far as Hungary.

Alone, carrying only a rucksack and with a small allowance of only a pound a week, Fermor had planned to sleep rough - to live 'like a tramp, a pilgrim, or a wandering scholar' - but a chance introduction in Bavaria led to comfortable stays in castles, and provided a glimpse of the old Europe of princes and peasants.

'Far from being the pious injunction of a Utopian dreamer, the command to love one's enemy is an absolute necessity for our survival'Advocating love as strength and non-violence as the most powerful weapon there is, these sermons and writings from the heart of the civil rights movement show Martin Luther King's rhetorical power at its most fiery and uplifting. One of twenty new books in the bestselling Penguin Great Ideas series. This new selection showcases a diverse list of thinkers who have helped shape our world today, from anarchists to stoics, feminists to prophets, satirists to Zen Buddhists.

A Very Easy Death has long been considered one of Simone de Beauvoir’s masterpieces. The profoundly moving, day-by-day recounting of her mother’s death “shows the power of compassion when it is allied with acute intelligence” (The Sunday Telegraph). Powerful, touching, and sometimes shocking, this is an end-of-life account that no reader is likely to forget.

For writers of Roman historical fiction: a basic guide to family life, food & clothing, housing & travel, law & order, economics, religion, and entertainment.

In this landmark work, four of the world's leading scholar-activists issue an urgent call for a truly intersectional, internationalist, abolitionist feminism. As a politics and as a practice, abolitionism has increasingly shaped our political moment, amplified through the worldwide protests following the 2020 murder of George Floyd by a uniformed police officer. It is at the heart of the Black Lives Matter movement, in its demands for police defunding and demilitarisation, and a halt to prison construction.

As this book shows, abolitionism and feminism stand shoulder-to-shoulder in fighting a common cause: the end of the carceral state, with its key role in perpetuating violence, both public and private, in prisons, in police forces, and in people's homes. Abolitionist theories and practices are at their most compelling when they are feminist; and a feminism that is also abolitionist is the most inclusive and persuasive version of feminism for these times. ABOLITION.

Western thinking has long been dominated by essence, by a preoccupation with that which dwells in itself and delimits itself from the other. By contrast, Far Eastern thought is centred not on essence but on absence. The fundamental topos of Far Eastern thinking is not being but 'the way' (dao), which lacks the solidity and fixedness of essence. The difference between essence and absence is the difference between being and path, between dwelling and wandering. 'A Zen monk should be without fixed abode, like the clouds, and without fixed support, like water', said the Japanese Zen master Dogen. Drawing on this fundamental distinction between essence and absence, Byung-Chul Han explores the differences between Western and Far Eastern philosophy, aesthetics, architecture and art, shedding fresh light on a culture of absence that may at first sight appear strange and unfamiliar to those in the West whose ways of thinking have been shaped for centuries by the preoccupation with essence.

The Acropolis and its Museum constitute an integrated architectural and artistic unity, one of the most important in the history of global civilization. An informative and attractive guidebook that brings to life the monuments preserved on the sacred rock and the unrivalled artworks exhibited in the museum makes visiting the Acropolis and its Museum a unique experience.
The Acropolis. Visiting its Museum and its Monuments, outcome of assiduous research based on the most recent scientific findings, aims to be a friendly and useful travel companion. Its descriptions and interpretative analyses help us to see the monuments in a different way and to understand the historical, artistic and political events that contributed to their creation. Through the texts and the illustrations we get to know the gods and heroes who were worshipped on the Acropolis, the leaders who envisaged the major projects, the artists who brought them to fruition, as well as the innovative ideas they applied and the Athenian citizens who admired and enjoyed these achievements.
This little book will help us to explore and engage with the monuments of Acropolis, not with awe but with the joy that springs from knowledge.

Adapting Philosophy looks at the ways in which The Matrix Trilogy adapts Jean Baudrillard’s Simulacra and Simulation, and in doing so creates its own distinctive philosophical position. Where previous work in the field has presented the trilogy as a simple ‘beginner’s guide’ to philosophy, this study offers a new methodology for inter-relating philosophy and film texts, focusing on the conceptual role played by imagery in both types of text. This focus on the figurative enables a new-found appreciation of the liveliness of philosophical writing and the multiple philosophical dimensions of Hollywood films. The book opens with a critical overview of existing philosophical writing on The Matrix Trilogy and goes on to draw on adaptation theory and feminist philosophy in order to create a new methodology for interlinking philosophical and filmic texts. Three chapters are devoted to detailed textual analyses of the films, tracing the ways in which the imagery that dominates Baudrillard’s writing is adapted and transformed by the trilogy’s complex visuals and soundtrack. The conclusion situates the methodology developed throughout the book in relation to other approaches currently emerging in the new field of Film-Philosophy. The book’s multi-disciplinary approach encompasses Philosophy, Film Studies and Adaptation Theory and will be of interest to undergraduates and postgraduates studying these subjects. It also forms part of the developing interdisciplinary field of Film-Philosophy. The detailed textual analyses of The Matrix Trilogy will also be of interest to anyone wishing to deepen their understanding of the multi-faceted nature of this seminal work.

"Zissimos Lorenzatos (1915-2004), essayist, thinker and poet, was arguably Greece’s most significant man of letters in the twentieth century. In the Aegean Notebooks, a record of his observations and reflections while sailing among the Greek islands in the 1970s and 1980s, the special quality of his literary and philosophical gifts, and of the man himself, are vividly present. Along with everything a mariner yearns to bring ashore, all he has felt and experienced at sea with the wake of the boat unfurling behind him, Lorenzatos brings us in addition a lifetime’s learning and contemplation. For him, life, and the living of it, was of the essence. As he observes in his foreword to these notebooks: '...life itself writes nothing, it erases everything that is written about it, and simply, irreplaceably lives, like the inaccessible ""well of water springing up""."

The Aegean – the island world of the Greeks – is a source of particular fascination: sun and sea, natural environment and culture, entertainment and Greek hospitality. Over the last few years the number of people who go hiking on the Aegean islands has grown steadily. Kalderimia and Monopatia are increasingly being designated as hiking paths and the volume of literature about them is increasing. A hiking holiday in the Aegean is particularly attractive when it involves ‘island-hopping’; this offers the opportunity to get to know the islands, each of them stamped with its own unique character, and to enjoy their infinite variety. This roaming lifestyle is the subject of “Aegean – Nature and hiking for island-hoppers”, which describes a total of 48 selected routes on 16 Aegean islands. The main purpose of this book is to draw the attention to the diversity of plants and animals. The biodiversity of the Aegean islands is particularly rich: circum-mediterranean representatives meet with species which originate from the Balkans and the Near East, and their number is further enhanced through numerous endemic species which developed in isolation after the Ice Age. However, only a small fraction of the several thousands of these species can be introduced through illustrations and notes. Ecological cohesions in typical Mediterranean habitats, the interesting behaviour of animals, the importance of some plants for Man, and traces of old agricultural practices constitute the reading material for a holiday of discovery, hiking or walking through the natural landscape.