If in the year 1411 you had been able to circumnavigate the globe, you would have been most impressed by the dazzling civilizations of the Orient. The Forbidden City was under construction in Ming Beijing; in the Near East, the Ottomans were closing in on Constantinople. By contrast, England would have struck you as a miserable backwater ravaged by plague, bad sanitation and in...(展开全部)

Questions of the nature of understanding and interpretation - hermeneutics - are fundamental in human life, though historically Westerners have tended to consider these questions within a purely Western context. In this comparative study, Zhang Longxi investigates the metaphorical nature of poetic language, highlighting the central figures of reality and meaning in both Eastern...(展开全部)

Questions of the nature of understanding and interpretation—hermeneutics—are fundamental in human life, though historically Westerners have tended to consider these questions within a purely Western context. In this comparative study, Zhang Longxi investigates the metaphorical nature of poetic language, highlighting the central figures of reality and meaning in both Eastern...(展开全部)

"The Mitrokhin Archive" tells for the first time in full the startling story of Soviet attempts to infiltrate the West. Working from Vasili Mitrokhin's archive and his own unrivalled expertise in the history of intelligence, Christopher Andrew has created an extraordinary picture of a USSR committed to covert activity at home and abroad to maintain Communism. From technological...(展开全部)

If you can find a better bang for the buck than Wicked, please let me know. I picked up Wicked, knowing nothing except that its subject matter was the Wicked Witch of the West, to be drawn immediately into Maguire's splendidly imagined world of sentient animals, multiple societies, and unique physical laws. Wicked is an enthralling, great read, hugely entertaining. On top of al...(展开全部)

The East in the West reassesses Western views of Asia. Traditionally many European historians and theorists have seen the societies of the East as 'static' or 'backward'. Jack Goody challenges these assumptions, beginning with the notion of a special Western rationality which enabled 'us' and not 'them' to modernise. He then turns to book-keeping, which several social and econo...(展开全部)

Oswald Spengler was born in 1880 at Blankenburg, Germany. He studied mathematics, philosophy, and history at Munich and Berlin. Except for his doctor's thesis on Heraclitus, he published nothing before the first volume of The Decline of the West, which appeared when he was thirty-eight. The Agadir crisis of 1911 provided the immediate incentive for his exhaustive investigations...(展开全部)

A brilliant account of religion's role in the political thinking of the West, from the Enlightenment to the close of World War II. The wish to bring political life under God's authority is nothing new, and it's clear that today religious passions are again driving world politics, confounding expectations of a secular future. In this major book, Mark Lilla reveals the sources o...(展开全部)