An examination of the many diseases and ailments that have affected children across the centuries- the experiences of children and the efforts made to help them.

A new collection of Jonathan Franzen's non fiction

The two essays in this collection from the Prometheus Trust in association with the Centre for Platonic studies address the question " What is to be done?" 

In this new book John Gray continues the thinking that was so impressive in Straw Dogs.

All the great ideas that gave meaning to earlier western societies are now in disarray. People are no longer roused by God, the nation, democracy, revolution or freedom. Has love survived?

Mabey stands out as someone who not only sees beauty in nature but understands it.

So what's the big difference anyway?

In this book Lieberman deals with the nature of Homo Sapiens. He argues that evolution has equipped humans with the most marvellous gift in the animal world - the freedom to be unpredictable.

If you want to find out why adult male elephant seals can weigh more than four times as much as the female or why female blanket octopuses are truly enormous compared to their tiny male partners, this fascinating book is for you.

A wry and wise memoir of a unique career, just as distinctive as Tracey Horn's singing voice.

 "Sexual virtue was the primary index of female respectability in eighteenth-century Ireland; and, because the consequences of transgression were so acute, there was little that women caught in this maelstrom were not prepared to contemplate in order to escape the social sanction that followed the loss of reputation." Taken from one of the many interesting essays that comprise this collection.

This luminous account of a disease that has affected almost everybody describes tumors that evolve like alien creatures inside the body, paleo-oncologists who uncover petrified tumors clinging to the skeletons of dinosaurs, surprising reversals in science's understanding of the causes of cancer and, perhaps most fascinating, how cancer borrows natural processes involved in the healing of wounds and turns them against the body.

Laurie Taylor argues that Inglis does excellent justice to Richard Hoggart's unrivalled studies of working class and organisational culture and that he also brilliantly captures Hoggart's abiding concern with the moral quality of human life.

Lloyd focuses especially on what is distinctive in ideas of intellectual character offered by key Enlightenment thinkers - on their attitudes to belief and scepticism; on their optimism about the future; and on the uncertainties and instabilities which nonetheless often lurk beneath their use of imagery of light.

Pascal Bruckner's provocative social study considers why, in an age of marrying for love, modern wedlock is failing so spectacularly.

A compelling documentation of a special father daughter relationship, one with interesting ramifications which offers an insight into the lives and  world of  the two major figures in psychoanalysis.

Does God make us good? Big Gods argues that some gods were more effective than others in promoting trust and cooperation between strangers.According to one commentator this book brings faith closer to where Darwin thought it belonged, to the sphere of social life.

Cynthia Ozick says this book is an electrifying undressing of Jewish humour that takes it far beyond Freud's more inhibiting perceptions and into the naked precincts of tragic insight.

In two papers derived from Jacques Lacan's oral work on the subjects of Christian spirituality and psychoanalysis, this book presents his contentions with Freud's belief that religion was an illusion that science would eventually shatter. On the contrary, as Jacques-Alain Miller notes, Lacan thought "that the true religion, Roman Catholicism, would take in everyone in the end, pouring bucketsful of meaning over the ever more insistent and unbearable real that we, in our times, owe to science."

Simon Critchley observes that Lyotard suffered the fate of having his name attached to a once fashionable idea that is now decisively démodé: postmodernism. These introductory lectures to philosophy, aimed at first year students, show why it is still important and worthwhile to read Lyotard.