At sixteen, Jesse James began his fighting career by killing Unionist neighbours on their doorsteps. In the bloodshed and bitterness that followed the South's surrender at Appomattox, Jesse and his fellow guerillas, with their gunfights and hold-ups, became part of the intensely brutal struggle by t[...]

Medieval Iceland was unique amongst Western Europe, with no foreign policy, no defense forces, no king, no lords, no peasants and few battles. It should have been a utopia yet its literature is dominated by brutality and killing. The reasons for this, argues Jesse Byock, lie in the underlying struct[...]

Based on Viking Age poems, "The Saga of the Volsungs" combines mythology, legend and sheer human drama. At its heart are the heroic deeds of Sigurd the dragon slayer who acquires magical knowledge from one of Odin's Valkyries. Yet it is also set in a very human world, incorporating strands from the [...]

We are constantly told that human traits - from aggression to gender differences - are 'hardwired'. In "Beyond Human Nature" Jesse J. Prinz reveals that it is the societies we live in, not our genes, that determine how we think and feel. From why mental illness differs so widely between cultures to [...]

Synthesizing decades of research, The Conscious Brain advances a theory of the psychological and neurophysiological correlates of conscious experience. In the first part of the book, Prinz argues that consciousness always arises at a particular stage of perceptual processing, the intermediate level,[...]

Jesse Prinz argues that recent work in philosophy, neuroscience, and anthropology supports two radical hypotheses about the nature of morality: moral values are based on emotional responses, and these emotional responses are inculcated by culture, not hard-wired through natural selection. In the fir[...]

It's 1994 and the former Yugoslavia is being torn apart. In England, a gang of good-hearted young people are about to set off in a Ford Transit van armed with several sacks of rice and a half-written play. A play which will light a beacon of peace across the Balkans and, very probably, stop the war.[...]

Western philosophy has long been divided between empiricists, who argue that human understanding has its basis in experience, and rationalists, who argue that reason is the source of knowledge. A central issue in the debate is the nature of concepts, the internal representations we use to think abou[...]

Hailed as one of the most influential and expressive painters of the seventeenth century, Artemisia Gentileschi (1593-ca. 1656) has figured prominently in the art historical discourse of the past two decades. This attention to Artemisia, after many years of scholarly neglect, is partially due to int[...]

From the celebrated author of "The Curfew" ("A spare masterwork of dystopian fiction" "--The New York Times Book Review"), Jesse Ball's "Silence Once Begun" is an astonishing novel of unjust conviction, lost love, and a journalist's obsession.
Over the course of several months, eight people vani[...]

Hegel and Manfried Grossbart may not consider themselves bad men - but death still stalks them through the dark woods of medieval Europe.
The year is 1364, and the brothers Grossbart have embarked on a naive quest for fortune. Descended from a long line of graverobbers, they are determined to fo[...]