The retrospective of portraits of Mick Jagger, one of the worlds most photographed performers, was a highlight of the 2010 Arles photography festival. This book gathers together all the photographs from that exhibition, introduced by the Festivals director, Francois Hebel. Hebel writes, 'In order to[...]

Born in 1962 in the city of Daqing in Heilongjiang Province in China, Yue Minjun is an icon of contemporary Chinese painting. Considered one of the protagonists of Cynical Realism, an art movement that emerged after the student demonstrations in Tiananmen Square in 1989, he began developing his own [...]

Herodotus' great work is not only an account of the momentous historical conflict between the Greeks and the Persians but also the earliest sustained exploration in the West of the problem of cultural difference. Francois Hartog asks fundamental questions about how Herodotus represented this differe[...]

This 1983 book records a fascinating analysis of the Solidarity movement in Poland. Alain Touraine here proposes an understanding of the place of social movements in contemporary society, and a fresh means of analysing them through 'sociological intervention'. In 1981 he and a team of researchers ap[...]

Fenelon's Telemachus (1699) is, alongside Bossuet's Politics, the most important work of political theory of the grand siecle in France. It was also the most widely read work of the time, influencing Montesquieu and Rousseau in its attempt to combine monarchism with republican virtues. Fenelon tells[...]

The definition and measurement of social welfare have been a vexed issue for the past century. This 2011 book makes a constructive, easily applicable proposal and suggests how to evaluate the economic situation of a society in a way that gives priority to the worse-off and that respects each individ[...]

Essays discuss philosophy, film, painting, psychoanalysis, Judaism, and politics

The quest for roots has been an enduring American preoccupation. Over the centuries, generations have sketched coats of arms, embroidered family trees, established local genealogical societies, and carefully filled in the blanks in their bibles, all in pursuit of self-knowledge and status through ki[...]

Whether in family life, social interactions, or business negotiations, half the people in the world speak more than one language every day. Yet many myths persist about bilingualism and bilinguals. In a lively and entertaining book, an international authority on bilingualism explores the many facets[...]

In "The Logic of Life" Francois Jacob looks at the way our understanding of biology has changed since the sixteenth century. He describes four fundamental turning points in the perception of the structure of living things: the discoveries of the functions of organs, cells, chromosomes and genes, and[...]