The book combines revealing scholarship with stunning, full-colour illustrations from the rich manuscript tradition of the Shahnameh. International experts including Charles Melville, Barbara Brend, Dick Davis and Firuza Abullaeva shed light on the epic's background, national importance and... číst celé
Presents work by a generation of scholars responding directly to the author's idea of the 'travelling concept'. This work makes a contribution to the territorial conflicts between visual culture, art history and cultural studies.
Putting readers into the shoes of film and TV professionals, Adventures in the Lives of Others is a gripping insider's account of ethics, problem-solving and decision-making at the cutting edge of documentaries and factual television.
Decline and Fall of the Sasanians has already been praised as one of the most intellectually exciting books about ancient Persia to have been published for years. číst celé
From Cairo to Damascus and from Tunisia to Bahrain, Layla Al-Zubaidi and Matthew Cassel have brought together some of the most exciting new writing born out of revolution in the Arab world. This is a remarkable collection of testimony, entirely composed by participants in, and witnesses to, the profound changes shaking their region.
Ugliness is very much alive in the history of art. From ritual invocations of mythic monsters to the scare tactics of the early twentieth-century avant-garde, from the cabinet of curiosities to the identity politics of today, the ugly has been every bit as active as the beautiful, and often much more of a reality - Why then has it been so neglected? This book seeks to remedy this oversight through both broad theoretical reflection and concrete case studies of ugliness in various historical and cultural contexts. The protagonists range from cooks to psychoanalysts, from war prostheses to plates of asparagus, on a world stage stretching from ancient Athens to Singapore today. Drawing across disciplinary and cultural boundaries, the writers illuminate why ugliness, associated over the millennia with negative categories ranging from sin and stupidity to triviality and boredom, remains central to art and cultural practice.
It was long assumed that the Soviet Union dictated Warsaw Pact policy in Africa, Asia, the Middle East and Latin America (known as the 'Third World' during the Cold War). číst celé
Based on new research and previously unpublished sources, a major biography of one of the great British statesmen of the 20th century
There has been an explosion of interest in how religion and the sacred connect with the media and cultures of everyday life. This book offers a review of this field of scholarship, highlighting both its achievements and flaws, and setting out an agenda for its next phase of study.
Prominent intellectuals grapple with the Brexit conundrum