Should the ancient Greeks - the oldest dead white European males - and their legacy have any relevance to the way we live now? So much of what the ancients were and did may now appear positively racist and sexist in this era of multiculturalism.

Who has brought the world of ancient Greece and Rome to life for the uninitiated reader and scholar alike.

With advice and informative readings of the great Greek texts, this title shows how we might save classics and the Greeks. It is suitable for those who agree that knowledge of classics acquaints us with the beauty and perils of our own culture.

Linked by the events of Bernard Knox's remarkable life, the twenty-five chapters of "Essays Ancient and Modern" cover subjects ranging from Hesiod, Homer, and Thucydides to Auden, Forster, and the Spanish Civil War. With a masterful eye for the telling detail, Knox continually reminds us that we share the present with antiquity's living past. A soldier in Italy finds a battered book in the rubble of a bombed-out firehouse-- and opens it to read Virgil's denunciation of war. An illiterate Greek bard composes a garbled Homeric song to celebrate the recent heroism of local partisans. A traveler heading north from modern Athens must choose between the Sacred Way-- or the NATO Road.

Utopia is a work of fiction and socio-political satire by Thomas More published in 1516 in Latin. The book is a frame narrative primarily depicting a fictional island society and its religious, social and political customs. Many aspects of More's description of Utopia are reminiscent of life in monasteries.

A page-turning novel that is also an exploration of the great philosophical concepts of Western thought, Jostein Gaarder's Sophie's World has fired the imagination of readers all over the world, with more than twenty million copies in print. One day fourteen-year-old Sophie Amundsen comes home from school to find in her mailbox two notes, with one question on each: "Who are you?" and "Where does the world come from?" From that irresistible beginning, Sophie becomes obsessed with questions that take her far beyond what she knows of her Norwegian village. Through those letters, she enrolls in a kind of correspondence course, covering Socrates to Sartre, with a mysterious philosopher, while receiving letters addressed to another girl. Who is Hilde? And why does her mail keep turning up? To unravel this riddle, Sophie must use the philosophy she is learning—but the truth turns out to be far more complicated than she could have imagined.

A wide range of sources - by writers, diplomats, tourists, businessmen, and missionaries - documenting the political, cultural and social history of Japan from 1400 to the 20th century.

A collection of non-specialist essays on Cambridge University's 'contribution' to certain key disciplines.

This book examines authority in discourse from ancient to modern historians, while also presenting instances of current subversions of the classical rhetorical ethos. Ancient rhetoric set out the rules of authority in discourse, and directly affected the claims of Greek and Roman historians to truth. These working principles were consolidated in modern tradition, but not without modifications. The contemporary world, in its turn, subverts in many new ways the weight of the author's claim to legitimacy and truth, through the active role of the audiences. How have the ancient claims to authority worked and changed from their own times to our post-modern, digital world? Online uses and outreach displays of the classical past, especially through social media, have altered the balance of the authority traditionally bestowed upon the ancients, demonstrating what the linguistic turn has shown: the role of the reader is as important as that of the writer.

Founders, classics, and canons have been vitally important in helping to frame sociology's identity. Within the academy today, a number of positions?feminist, postmodernist, postcolonial?question the status of "tradition."In Founders, Classics, Canons, Peter Baehr defends the continuing importance of sociology's classics and traditions in a university education. Baehr offers arguments against interpreting, defending, and attacking sociology's great texts and authors in terms of founders and canons. He demonstrates why, in logical and historical terms, discourses and traditions cannot actually be "founded" and why the term "founder" has little explanatory content. Equally, he takes issue with the notion of "canon" and argues that the analogy between the theological canon and sociological classic texts, though seductive, is mistaken.Although he questions the uses to which the concepts of founder, classic, and canon have been put, Baehr is not dismissive. On the contrary, he seeks to understand the value and meaning these concepts have for the people who employ them in the cultural battle to affirm or attack the liberal university tradition.