From the bestselling author of Born on a Blue Day and Thinking in Numbers, a delightful and eclectic exploration of language, and what it can teach us about ourselves and our lives.Why is the name 'Cleopatra' not allowed in Iceland? Why do clocks 'talk' to t... read more

Do you consider yourself stoical? Do a bit of meditation or mindfulness practice? Buddhism and Stoicism have a lot to offer modern readers seeking the good life, but they're also radical systems that ask much of their followers. I... read more

Featuring Freud! Groucho Marx! Socrates! Lily Tomlin! Kierkegaard! Buddha! New Yorker cartoonists! Zombies! And of course, Heidegger! Thomas Cathcart and Daniel Klein first made a name for themselves with the outrageously funny New York Times... read more

These authors range from John Henry Newman in the nineteenth century to Joseph Needham, who died in 1995, and include G. K. Chesterton, Arnold Toynbee, R. H. Tawney, Malcolm Muggeridge, T. S. Eliot and C. S Lewis. Their reactions vary fro... read more

Why am I here? Do I really know anything? What does it all mean? These are questions we all ask ourselves at some point in our lives. Mindfulness & The Big Questions offers an enlightening approach to these universal existential conundrums... read more

To understand China, it is essential to understand Confucianism. First formulated in the sixth century BCE, the teachings of Confucius would come to dominate Chinese society, politics, economics, and ethics. In this Very Short Introduction, Daniel K. Gardner e... read more

No Description

There is a beyond of reason and unreason. It is the human psyche. -- Positive Nihilism Like many German intellectuals, Hartmut Lange has long grappled with Heidegger. Positive Nihilism is the result of a lifetime of reading Being and Time and offers... read more

No Description

Some of our strongest, most lasting relationships are hidden in plain view-those we have with objects. What do our possessions do for us? And how do they do it? In The Promise of Things, Ruth Quibell explores what our possessions say about us: who we think we are, what we long... read more

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER * A bold new work from the author of The Black Swan that challenges many of our long-held beliefs about risk and reward, politics and religion, finance and personal responsibility In his most provocative and practical book yet, one of the for... read more

Only when I first understood that I had a primal need for silence, was I able to begin my search for it - and there, deep beneath a cacophony of traffic noise and thoughts, music and machinery, iPhones and snowploughs, it lay in wait for me. The silence.' In Silence, ... read more