Greece

It's time for us to re-examine the past. Our lives are infinitely richer if we take the time to look at what the Greeks and Romans have given us in politics and law, religion and philosophy and education, and to learn how people really lived in Athens, Rome, Sparta and Alexandria. This is a book with a serious point to make but the author isn't simply a classicist but a comedian and broadcaster who has made television and radio documentaries about humour, education and Dorothy Parker. This is a book for us all.

Written for the general visitor, the Athenian Agora Museum Guide is a companion to the 2010 edition of the Athenian Agora Site Guide and leads the reader through all of the display spaces within the Stoa of Attalos in the Athenian Agora.

My name is Vassilis Kallidis & I’m a chef, a restaurant owner, a book author, I host my travel and cooking tv show but above all I’m a foodie & a passionate traveler. This is my third guide book devoted to the city of Athens, the city I live & love most. This is not a proper city guide including all the musts & the do’s. I want you to see the real face of Athens, to eat, drink & walk like a local. I made a selection of places I adore and every time I visit I say to myself “Damn, the fish here is so fresh I wish the tourists knew this place!” Traveling around the world I know how it feels to be lost, first couple of days, visiting a vast city. I’m desperate to find what the locals eat in holes in the wall, with no waste of time. I always wish someone wrote a guide with real information, not just for tourists. This is what I did here for my friends visiting Athens & you all. Enjoy my book and the city!

Samuel Butler, scholar, painter, pioneer photographer, and novelist (including 'Erewhon' and 'The Way of All Flesh'), was one of the less orthodox of Victorian intellectual provocateurs, who confronted powerful orthodoxies such as the Church, the academic establishment, and scientific Darwinism. During the last decade of his productive life (he died in 1902), his main concern became the 'Homeric question'. In his youth, he had been a classical scholar at St John's College, Cambridge; but 'The Authoress of the Odyssey' [1897] is unlike any work of mainstream Victorian classics. His theory - that the Odyssey was written by a woman and (even more startlingly) by one who configured herself in the epic as the Phaeacian princess, Nausicaa - set him on collision course with all the 'orthodoxies' of the stuffy, patriarchal establishment of 'Oxbridge' scholarship. His exposition hesitates (brilliantly, or accidentally?) in the grey area between closely reasoned argument, eccentric tomfoolery and knowing pole

Nussbaum pursues this “noble but flawed” vision of world citizenship as it finds expression in figures of Greco-Roman antiquity, Hugo Grotius in the seventeenth century, Adam Smith during the eighteenth century, and various contemporary thinkers. She confronts its inherent tensions: the ideal suggests that moral personality is complete, and completely beautiful, without any external aids, while reality insists that basic material needs must be met if people are to realize fully their inherent dignity. Given the global prevalence of material want, the lesser social opportunities of people with physical and cognitive disabilities, the conflicting beliefs of a pluralistic society, and the challenge of mass migration and asylum seekers, what political principles should we endorse? Nussbaum brings her version of the Capabilities Approach to these problems, and she goes further: she takes on the challenge of recognizing the moral claims of nonhuman animals and the natural world.

The insight that politics ought to treat human beings both as equal to each other and as having a worth beyond price is responsible for much that is fine in the modern Western political imagination. The Cosmopolitan Tradition extends Nussbaum’s work, urging us to focus on the humanity we share rather than all that divides us.

When Edward Lear set off from Corfu for Crete in April 1864, it was in no very optimistic frame of mind. For the last nine years Corfu had been his winter home but after half a century of British rule the island had been ceded to Greece and Lear felt obliged to move. His livelihood required an immediate expedition to new scenes and he probably assumed that another book of Mediterranean travels would be likely to sell. So it was that he chose Crete.

Ιn 1955, a young student of the Geneva School of Architecture, Manuel Baud-Bovy, visited Tinos for the first time, staying in a cottage on the sandy beach of Kiona.

While exploring the island, Manuel came across some unusual buildings that he had never heard of before. With growing surprise and enthusiasm, in each of his excursions he discovered lonely dovecotes on sandy beaches, others nestling into the slopes and others dominating the heights, each surpassing the last in beauty and dignity.

Thanks to his father, Samuel, an ethnomusicologist, Manuel had developed an interest in the study of folk culture. Moreover, his famous grandfather, Daniel, had published studies and books on traditional Swiss architecture …

Manuel Baud-Bovy, deeply impressed, thought of compiling a systematic list of the dovecotes. He walked all over the island and sometimes slept in a village, sometimes under the stars or on a threshing floor, in a chapel, or even in an abandoned dovecote. He discovered about eight hundred of them, which he recorded in four large albums with detailed plans, theories and thoughts, which he submitted to the Geneva School of Architecture for his doctoral dissertation.

After 60 and more years, a selection of this rare and valuable material becomes a book, enriched with introductory texts and many photographic documents that capture the dovecotes as they were preserved in 1955. In this way, this work strongly highlights the need to protect our cultural heritage while encouraging us to tramp the paths of the island once more …