Rome - as a city, as an empire, as an enduring idea - is in many ways the origin of everything Robert Hughes has spent his life thinking and writing about with such dazzling irreverence and exacting rigour. In this magisterial book he traces the city's history from its mythic foundation with Romulus and Remus to Fascism, Fellini and beyond. For almost a thousand years, Rome hel...(展开全部)

From Robert Hughes, one of the greatest art and cultural critics of our time, comes a sprawling, comprehensive, and deeply personal history of Rome—as a city, as an empire, and as an origin of Western art and civilization. Starting on a personal note, Hughes takes us to the Rome he first encountered as a hungry twenty-one-year-old fresh from Australia in 1959. From there, he...(展开全部)

From Robert Hughes, one of the greatest art and cultural critics of our time, comes a sprawling, comprehensive, and deeply personal history of Rome—as city, as empire, and, crucially, as an origin of Western art and civilization, two subjects about which Hughes has spent his life writing and thinking. Starting on a personal note, Hughes takes us to the Rome he first encountere...(展开全部)

This is the ultimate record of guns through the ages. From rifles to sniper guns, machine guns to grenade launchers, a fully loaded guide to over 300 of the most important guns from the last 700 years. Discover revealing features on twenty 'key' guns from history, including the Musket, Gatling Gun and AK-47 assault rifle. Step inside famous gun maker factories, from Colt and Sm...(展开全部)

One of the most common--and wounding--misconceptions about literary scholars today is that they simply don't love books. While those actually working in literary studies can easily refute this claim, such a response risks obscuring a more fundamental question: why should they? That question led Deidre Shauna Lynch into the historical and cultural investigation of Loving Literat...(展开全部)

One of the most common--and wounding--misconceptions about literary scholars today is that they simply don't love books. While those actually working in literary studies can easily refute this claim, such a response risks obscuring a more fundamental question: why should they? That question led Deidre Shauna Lynch into the historical and cultural investigation of Loving Literat...(展开全部)

Chopsticks have become a quintessential part of the Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Vietnamese culinary experience across the globe, with more than one fifth of the world’s population using them daily to eat. In this vibrant, highly original account of the history of chopsticks, Q. Edward Wang charts their evolution from a simple eating implement in ancient times to their status ...(展开全部)

Cheerfulness: A Literary and Cultural History tells a new story about the cultural imagination of the West. Timothy Hampton shows how cheerfulness—a momentary uptick in emotional energy, a temporary lightening of spirit—functions as a theme in the work of major artists from Shakespeare to Louis Armstrong. The book studies both the philosophical construal of cheerfulness—as a th...(展开全部)

Worrying: A Literary and Cultural History suggests a unique approach to the inner life and its ordinary pains. Francis O'Gorman charts the emergence of our contemporary idea of worry in the Victorian era and its establishment, after the First World War, as a feature of modernity. For some writers between the Wars, worry was the "disease of the age." Worrying examines the everyd...(展开全部)

It is the subject of countless poems and paintings; the top of the weather report; the source of the world's water. Yet this is the first book to tell the story of rain. Cynthia Barnett's Rain begins four billion years ago with the torrents that filled the oceans, and builds to the storms of climate change. It weaves together science—the true shape of a raindrop, the mysteries ...(展开全部)