A major study of the collapse of the Soviet Union—showing how Gorbachev’s misguided reforms led to its demise

A new approach to the challenges surrounding artificial intelligence that argues for assessing AI actions as if they came from a human being

Ian Buruma explores the life and death of Baruch Spinoza, the Enlightenment thinker whose belief in freedom of thought and speech resonates in our own time

Presents a controversial view of the origins of fascism, locating them in the eighteenth century with the advent of the Anti-Enlightenment, a far earlier date than most historians. This book contends that J G Herder, Edmund Burke, and Joseph de Maistre can be connected to the origins of the Anti-Enlightenment.

A surprising assessment of the ways that virtual worlds are entangled with human psychology Proteus, the mythical sea god who could alter his appearance at will, embodies one of the promises of online games: the ability to reinvent oneself. Yet inhabitants of virtual worlds rarely achieve this liberty, game researcher Nick Yee contends. Though online games evoke freedom and escapism, Yee shows that virtual spaces perpetuate social norms and stereotypes from the offline world, transform play i...

The calamities of the mid-seventeenth century were not only unprecedented, they were agonisingly widespread. The author examines first-hand accounts of men and women throughout the world describing what they saw and suffered during a sequence of political, economic and social crises that stretched from 1618 to the 1680s.

The intriguing history of Dickens’s London, showing how tourists have reimagined and reinvented the Dickensian metropolis for more than 150 years