Words & Ideas > Contemporary Thought

Whether to escape the rat race or to help save our environment, people are getting back to nature. Allotments and green spaces have never been so popular, seasonal and local produce is the order of the day, and the healthy nostalgia of growing heirloom vegetables is unquestionably and delightfully in vogue. A Potted History of Vegetables embraces this idea by reaquainting the reader with the origins, nature, and peculiarities of the world's produce. Combining beautiful reproductions of the finest nineteenth century botanical illust... read more

The bestselling author of "The Man Who Mistook His Wife For a Hat" describes how we experience the visual world. In "Musicophilia", Oliver Sacks explored music and the brain; now, in "The Mind's Eye", he writes about the myriad ways in which we experience the visual world: how we see in three dimensions; how we recognize individual faces or places; how we use language to communicate verbally; how we translate marks on paper into words and paragraphs, even how we represent the world internally when our eyes are closed. Alongside rem... read more

With buying local or gathering and harvesting your own fruit very much in vogue and heirloom varieties enjoying a renaissance, here is your opportunity to discover the origins, nature and personalities of everyday and unusual fruit. Combining exquisite botanical illustrations with fascinating facts and practical tips for growing and enjoying your own produce, A Potted History of Fruit unearths a wealth of kitchen and garden knowledge. Whether it's the creation of the cubic watermelon, the electric power of the lemon, or a guide to ... read more

Everyone needs this book if they want to know how to get out of difficult situations whether at home or abroad. Written by Rosie Garthwaite, whose career as a journalist started in war-torn Basra, this book combines practical advice with contributions from many journalists and commentators including Rageh Omar and John Simpson, who share their own experience and advice on surviving in difficult and dangerous situations. Topics include how to avoid being misunderstood; how to avoid bombs and booby traps; how to escape from a riot; h... read more

Hysteria as a disease no longer exists, but in the nineteenth century hysteria was thought to affect half of all women in one of its myriad forms. In 1862 the famous and infamous Salpetriere Hospital in Paris, under the reign of renowned neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot, became the focal point for study of the mysterious illness. Physicians could find no cause, which meant a cure was not possible, but Charcot concentrated on treating the symptoms; with hypnosis, gongs, tuning forks, piercing and the evocation of demons and saints. C... read more

Stories of individual pirates in the Caribbean, from Blackbeard to Calico Jack, have been the stuff of legend since the eighteenth century, but in Spanish Gold pirate expert David Cordingly at last gives us the big picture in all its bold and ruthless truth. Cordingly shows how the attacks of the buccaneers on the treasure ports of the Spanish Main, and the sacking of Panama by Sir Henry Morgan in 1671, were the prologue to an explosion of piracy which led to the establishment of a pirate colony at Nassau in the Bahamas. By ... read more

Hilarious and moving, The Family Law is a linked series of tales from a born humorist. Benjamin Law invites readers into the world of his endearing yet profoundly eccentric family. Why won't his Chinese dad wear made-in-China underpants? Why was most of his extended family deported in the 1980s? Will Benjamin's childhood dreams of Home and Away stardom come to nothing? What are his chances of finding love?

"The book is like the spoon: once invented, it cannot be bettered". (Umberto Eco). These days it is impossible to get away from discussions of whether the book will survive the digital revolution. Blogs, tweets and newspaper articles on the subject appear daily, many of them repetitive, most of them admitting ignorance of the future. Amidst the twittering, the thoughts of Jean-Claude Carriere and Umberto Eco come as a breath of fresh air. This thought-provoking book takes the form of a conversation in which Carriere and Eco discuss... read more

With Stendhal is a delightful portrait of the nineteenth-century French novelist Henri Beyle, better known to us as Stendhal. Two linked texts, introduced, annotated and translated into English for the first time by Simon Leys, illuminate the life and mind of the great writer. The first piece is a set of impressions and memories written by Stendhal's famous friend Prosper Merimee. Several vignettes reveal Stendhal's character - charismatic, engaging, frenetic, hyper-romantic - accompanied by amusing anecdotes of him duelling, falli... read more

The Victorian era was the high point of literary tourism. Writers such as Charles Dickens, George Eliot, and Sir Walter Scott became celebrities, and readers trekked far and wide for a glimpse of the places where their heroes wrote and thought, walked and talked. Even Shakespeare was roped in, as Victorian entrepreneurs transformed quiet Stratford-upon-Avon into a combination shrine and tourist trap. Stratford continues to lure tourists today, as do many other sites of literary pilgrimage throughout Britain. And our modern age coul... read more

An astonishing new scientific discovery called neuroplasticity is overthrowing the centuries-old notion that the adult human brain is fixed and unchanging. It is, instead, able to change its own structure and function, even into old age. Psychiatrist and researcher Norman Doidge travelled around the US to meet the brilliant scientists championing neuroplasticity, and the people whose lives they've transformed. We see a woman born with half a brain that rewired itself to work as a whole; a woman labelled retarded who cured her defic... read more

Baby bust. Environmental blasphemy. The hotness delusion syndrome. These are just some of the intriguing new phenomena this next decade may yield. The past decade has provided us with a lot of fodder for prognostications - with Facebook and Twitter coming up from nowhere to suddenly dominate the culture, the iPhone's complete transformation of communication and the WikiLeaks new world order, this decade has yielded much that would have been unthinkable in the once-futuristic-sounding year 2000. So what will 2020 look like? Will an ... read more

This new edition of the bestselling book Worldchanging brings readers up to date on the continuing movement for global change.

Is reading under threat? No, says Alan Jacobs - but people do need help and encouragement to enjoy it to the full. Jacobs's experience as a lecturer and many-time author suggests that many readers lack confidence; they wonder whether they are reading well, with proper focus and attentiveness, with due discretion and discernment. Many have absorbed the puritanical message that reading is, first and foremost, good for you - the intellectual equivalent of eating your Brussels sprouts. For such people, indeed for all readers, Jacobs o... read more

This year has seen unprecedented scrutiny of Rupert Murdoch's empire in Britain. But what about in Australia, where he owns 70 per cent of the press? In Bad News, Robert Manne investigates Murdoch's lead political voice here, the Australian newspaper, and how it shapes debate.Since 2002, under the editorship of Chris Mitchell, the Australian has come to see itself as judge, jury and would-be executioner of leaders and policies. Is this a dangerous case of power without responsibility? In a series of devastating case studies, Manne ... read more

We have less time for the needed global transformation than many had hoped or expected. Resource scarcity is already upon us in the form of soaring oil and food prices and a cascade of climate shocks. The soaring prices are not merely cyclical or the result of financial speculation - these remarkable price hikes, considered together with the climate shocks that helped to cause them, are actually the leading edge of the ecological crises that will sink us unless we act more rapidly and decisively. It's high time - indeed in the ... read more

A lively and eclectic sequence of more than 150 concise and intellectually challenging essays in which the world's leading thinkers reflect on how the internet has changed their modes of thought.
In How is the Internet Changing the Way you Think?, 154 of the world's leading intellectuals - scientists, artists and creative thinkers - explore exactly what it means to think in the new age of the Internet: from Nicholas Carr's reflections on what the Internet is doing to our brains, to Richard Dawkins's sanguine assessment of it... read more

"Roger Scruton is one of Britain's most respected thinkers and in this new book he offers a radically different solution to the planet's most important problem."

The environment has long been the undisputed territory of the political Left, which has seen the principal threats to the earth as issuing from international capitalism, consumerism and the over-exploitation of natural resources. In Green Philosophy, Roger Scruton shows the fallacies behind that way of thinking, and the danger that it poses to the ecosystems o... read more

Living with people who differ - racially, ethnically, religiously, or economically - is one of the most difficult challenges facing us today. Though our society is becoming ever more complicated materially, we tend to avoid engaging with people unlike ourselves. Modern politics emphasizes unity and similarity, encouraging the politics of the tribe rather than of complexity. "Together: The Rituals, Pleasures and Politics of Co-operation" explores why this has happened and what might be done about it. Sennett argues that living with ... read more

Fifty years after its first publication, Robin Boyd's bestselling The Australian Ugliness remains the definitive statement on how we live and think in the environments we create for ourselves. In it Boyd railed against Australia's promotion of ornament, decorative approach to design and slavish imitation of all things American. "The basis of the Australian ugliness," he wrote, "is an unwillingness to be committed on the level of ideas. In all the arts of living, in the shaping of all her artefacts, as in politics, Australia shuffle... read more