Libros de

El laberinto cuántico

cómo Richard Feynman y John Wheeler revolucionaron el tiempo y la realidad

En 1939, Richard Feynman, un brillante graduado del MIT, llegó a la oficina de Princeton de John Wheeler para presentarse como su asistente. A pesar de sus diferencias –Wheeler hablaba con voz suave y era un inconformista lleno de ideas descabelladas sobre el universo, y ...

La extraña derrota

testimonio escrito en 1940

En su obra póstuma, Marc Bloch, para algunos el mejor historiador del siglo xx, quiso contarnos sus experiencias del hundimiento de Francia en 1940: de una extraña y vergonzosa derrota que vivió como capitán de Estado Mayor, pero es también la reflexión de un intelectual ...

De entre humo

Después de un tiroteo que casi acaba con su vida, el subcomisario de la Ertzaintza Vicente Parra se reincorpora a su puesto. Ya en su primer día, se topa con un caso duro de roer: acaban de hallar un cadáver sin identificar dentro de un ...

El sombrero de Vermeer

los albores del mundo globalizado en el siglo XVII

A partir de la descripción pormenorizada de algunos de los cuadros más emblemáticos del pintor de Delft, Brook estudia el súbito intercambio de mercancías a escala global, entre Europa, América y Asia, que se desarrolla a lo largo del siglo XVII. Es la historia de ...

317 Km y dos salidas de emergencia

La poesía latía en las venas de Loreto Sesma desde pequeña. De su mano sobrevivió al naufragio y alcanzó la costa. Si no hay mejor sinónimo de la vida que el desgaste de la suela de los zapatos y las ruedas sobre el asfalto, Loreto ...

Liberalismo

los 10 principios básicos del orden político liberal

El concepto «liberalismo» aparece de manera cotidiana en las conversaciones y debates sobre política, economía o moral. Sin embargo, su significado e implicaciones pueden con frecuencia no ser evidentes e incluso resultar engañosas. ¿El liberalismo supone estar a favor de una fiscalidad reducida? ¿O hace ...

Filosofía en once frases

un libro para pensar sin ser subestimados

Darío Sztajnszrajber es el nuevo fenómeno en el mundo de la filosofía. En sus charlas al aire libre, en sus conferencias, logra convocar a miles de personas, como si fuera una especie de showman o un rockero. Su objetivo es llevar a los medios y ...

Garden History

a very short introduction

Gardens take many forms, and have a variety of functions. They can serve as spaces of peace and tranquilty, a way to cultivate wildlife, or as places to develop agricultural resources. Globally, gardens have inspired, comforted, and sustained people from all walks of life, and ...

Charles Dickens

a very short introduction

Charles Dickens is credited with creating some of the world's best-known fictional characters, and is widely regarded as the greatest novelist of the Victorian age. Even before reading the works of Dickens many people have met him already in some form or another. His ...

Film Noir

a very short introduction

Film noir, one of the most intriguing yet difficult to define terms in cinema history, is usually associated with a series of darkly seductive Hollywood thrillers from the 1940s and 50s - shadowy, black-and-white pictures about private eyes, femme fatales, outlaw lovers, criminal heists, corrupt police ...

Five modes of scepticism

sextus empiricus and the Agrippan Modes

Five Modes of Scepticism examines the argument forms that lie at the heart of Pyrrhonian scepticism as expressed in the writings of Sextus Empiricus. These are the Agrippan modes of disagreement, hypothesis, infinite regression, reciprocity and relativity; modes which are supposed to bring about that ...

Narratology

This volume explores the extraordinary contribution that classical poetics has made to twentieth and twenty-first century theories of narrative, aiming not to argue that modern narratologies simply present 'old wine in new wineskins', but rather to identify the diachronic affinities shared between ancient and modern ...

Figuring racism in Medieval Christianity

In Figuring Racism in Medieval Christianity, M. Lindsay Kaplan expands the study of the history of racism through an analysis of the Christian concept of Jewish hereditary inferiority. Imagined as a figural slavery, this idea anticipates modern racial ideologies in creating a status of permanent ...

Nebuchadnezzar's dream

the Crusades, apocalyptic prophecy, and the end of history

In 1099, the soldiers of the First Crusade, summoned by the Pope and gathered from throughout Christendom, took Jerusalem. As the news of this victory spread throughout Medieval Europe, it felt nothing less than miraculous and dream-like, to such an extent that many believed history ...

Urban panegyric and the transformation of the medieval city, 1100-1300

This study offers the first extensive analysis of the function and significance of urban panegyric in the Central Middle Ages, a flexible literary genre which enjoyed a marked and renewed popularity in the period 1100 to 1300. In doing so, it connects the production of ...

Armies of sand

the past, present, and future of arab military effectiveness

Since World War II, Arab armed forces have consistently punched below their weight-they have lost many wars that by all rights they should have won, and in their best performances only ever achieved quite modest accomplishments. Over time, soldiers, scholars, and military experts have offered ...

The subject of experience

The Subject of Experience is about the self, the person. It takes the form of a series of essays which draw on literature and psychology as well as philosophy. Galen Strawson discusses the phenomenology or experience of having or being a self (What is the ...

Zenobia

shooting star of Palmyra

Hailing from the Syrian city of Palmyra, a woman named Zenobia (also Bathzabbai) governed territory in the eastern Roman empire from 268 to 272. She thus became the most famous Palmyrene who ever lived. But sources for her life and career are scarce. This book ...

A concise history of History

global historiography from Antiquity to the Present

This short history of history is an ideal introduction for those studying or teaching the subject as part of courses on the historian's craft, historical theory and method, and historiography. Spanning the earliest known forms of historical writing in the ancient Near East right ...

Unearthly powers

religious and political change in world history

Why was religion so important for rulers in the pre-modern world? And how did the world come to be dominated by just a handful of religious traditions, especially Christianity, Islam, and Buddhism? Drawing on sociology and anthropology, as well as a huge range of historical ...