By the hundreds of millions we show up, stand in line, turn on, and tune in to watch, mesmerised, as athletes perform. And yet this experience, so widely craved and intensely felt, we commonly dismiss as 'only a game'. A book that looks beyond the usual explanations of why sport fascinates, "In Prai[...]

In the early 1980s California-based artist Raymond Pettibon first began making his signature inkwash drawings - combinations of cartoon-like images with short, enigmatic texts - to adorn the record covers of underground music groups like Black Flag and Sonic Youth. After turning a generation of punk[...]

Tuymans' monochromatic palette and choice of subject matter - domestic interiors, commonplace objects or family portraits - link painting with post-war filmmaking and amateur photography. The sources of other images on his canvases give his work a brooding violence. Although modest in scale and sens[...]

Ulrich Beck has emerged as one of the leading thinkers of the age. His principal claim to fame is as author of the widely acclaimed 'Risk Society', first published in 1986. Since this time, Beck's work has had a profound effect on the trajectory of social theory, leading to him being hailed as a zie[...]

This is a brilliant study of the nature of love in modern society. Ulrich Beck and Elisabeth Beck-Gernsheim argue that the nature of love is changing fundamentally, creating opportunities for democracy or chaos in personal life.[...]

This important new book offers an engaging and challenging introduction to the thorny paths of the globalization debate. Beck aims to clarify the ambiguities of the debate, to distinguish between the various types of globalization and to warn the reader of conceptual traps. Most importantly, however[...]

This volume examines how work has become unstable in the modern world and aims to present a new vision for the future. The author begins by describing how the traditional work society is giving way to a much less stable world in which skills can be suddenly devalued and jobs obliterated.[...]

This brilliant new book by one of Europe's leading social thinkers throws light on the global power games being played out between global business, nation states and movements rooted in civil society. Beck offers an illuminating account of the changing nature of power in the global age and assesses [...]

In this new book, Ulrich Beck develops his now widely used concepts of second modernity, risk society and reflexive sociology into a radical new sociological analysis of the cosmopolitan implications of globalization.[...]

Europe is Europe's last remaining realistic political utopia. But Europe remains to be understood and conceptualized. This historically unique form of international community cannot be explained in terms of the traditional concepts of politics and the state, which remain trapped in the straightjacke[...]

Twenty years ago Ulrich Beck published Risk Society , a book that called our attention to the dangers of environmental catastrophes and changed the way we think about contemporary societies. During the last two decades, the dangers highlighted by Beck have taken on new forms and assumed ever greate[...]

Religion posits one characteristic as an absolute: faith. Compared to faith, all other social distinctions and sources of conflict are insignificant. The New Testament says: 'We are all equal in the sight of God'. To be sure, this equality applies only to those who acknowledge God's existence.[...]

Love and family life in the global age: grandparents in Salonika and their grandson in London speak together every evening via Skype. A U.S. citizen and her Swiss husband fret over large telephone bills and high travel costs. A European couple can finally have a baby with the help of an Indian surro[...]