The good news is that the great thinkers from history have proposed the same strategies for happiness & fulfilment The bad news is that these turn out to be the very things most discouraged by contemporary culture This knotty dilemma is the subject of The Age of Absurdity- a wry & accessible investigation into how the desirable states of wellbeing & satisfaction are constantly undermined by modern life Michael Foley examines the elusive condition of happiness common to philosophy spiritual teachings & contemporary psychology then shows how these are becoming increasingly difficult to apply in a world of high expectations The common challenges of earning a living maintaining a relationship & ageing are becoming battlegrounds of existential angst & self-loathing in a culture that demands conspicuous consumption high-octane partnerships & perpetual youth In conclusion rather than denouncing & rejecting the age Foley presents an entertaining strategy of not just accepting but embracing today's world
- finding happiness in its absurdity
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Please note this is a region B Blu-ray & will require a region b or region free Blu-ray player in order to play Blake Lively & Michiel Huisman star in this fantasy drama directed by Lee Toland Krieger Unable to age after being struck by lightning during a car accident Adaline (Lively) has lived a solitary life to protect her secret But when a chance meeting with Ellis Jones (Huisman) leaves Adaline pining for the life she used to have Can she finally let her guard down & have another shot at love? The supporting cast

Includes:: Harrison Ford Kathy Baker & Ellen Burstyn

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Please note this is a region 2 DVD & will require a region 2 (Europe) or region Free DVD Player in order to play Blake Lively & Michiel Huisman star in this fantasy drama directed by Lee Toland Krieger Unable to age after being struck by lightning during a car accident Adaline (Lively) has lived a solitary life to protect her secret But when a chance meeting with Ellis Jones (Huisman) leaves Adaline pining for the life she used to have Can she finally let her guard down & have another shot at love? The supporting cast

Includes:: Harrison Ford Kathy Baker & Ellen Burstyn

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The Age of Agade is the first book-length study of the Akkadian period of Mesopotamian history which saw the rise & fall of the world's first empire during more than a century of extraordinary political social & cultural innovation It draws together more than 40 years of research by one of the world's leading experts in Assyriology to offer an exhaustive survey of the Akkadian empire Addressing all aspects of the empire including its statecraft & military territory & cities arts religion economy & production The Age of Agade considers what can be said of Akkadian political & social history material culture & daily life A final chapter also explores how the empire has been presented in modern historiography from the decipherment of cuneiform to the present including the extensive research of Soviet historians summarized here in English for the first time Drawing on contemporaneous written & artifactual sources as well as relevant materials from succeeding generations Foster introduces the reader to the wealth of evidence available Accessibly written by a specialist in the field this book is an engaging examination of a critical era in the history of early Mesopotamia ...

The Parallel Lives of Plutarch are cornerstones of Western literature & have exerted a profound influence on writers & statesmen since the Renaissance most notably Shakespeare This selection of ten biographies spans the period from the start of the fourth century BC to the early third & covers some of the most important figures in Greek history such as the orator Demosthenes & Alexander the Great as well as lesser known figures such as Plato&s pupil Dion of Syracuse Each Life is an important work of literature in itself but taken together they provide a vivid picture of the Greek world during a period that saw the collapse of Spartan power the rise of Macedonia the conquests of Alexander & the wars of his successors Timothy Duff&s revised version of Ian Scott-Kilvert&s translations is accompanied by a new general introduction & introductions & notes to each Life He has also added two Lives previously not included Artaxerxes I Great King of Persia from 405 to 359 BC & Eumenes of Cardia one of Alexander&s officers ...

The first & best major treatment of the crucial years 1848-1875 a penetrating analysis of the rise of capitalism throught the world In the 1860s a new word entered the economic & political vocabulary of the world 'capitalism' The global triumph of capitalism is the major theme of history in the decades after 1848 It was the triumph of a society which believed that economic growth rests on competitive private enterprise on success in buying everything in the cheapest market (including labour) & selling it in the dearest An economy so based & therefore nestling naturally on the sound foundations of a bourgoisie composed of those whom energy merit & intelligence had raised to their position & kept there would
- it was believed
- not only create a world of suitably distributed material plenty but of ever-growing enlightenment reason & human opportunity an advance of the sciences & the arts in brief a world of continuous & accelerating material & moral progress

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A riveting account of the pre-First World War years The Age of Decadence is an enormously impressive & enjoyable read' Dominic Sandbrook Sunday Times A magnificent account of a less than magnificent epoch' Jonathan Meades Literary Review The folk-memory of Britain in the years before the Great War is of a powerful contented orderly & thriving country She commanded a vast empire She bestrode international commerce Her citizens were living longer profiting from civil liberties their grandparents only dreamt of & enjoying an expanding range of comforts & pastimes The mood of pride & self-confidence is familiar from Elgar's Pomp & Circumstance marches newsreels of George V's coronation & the London's great Edwardian palaces Yet things were very different below the surface In The Age of Decadence Simon Heffer exposes the contradictions of late-Victorian & Edwardian Britain He explains how despite the nation's massive power a mismanaged war against the Boers in South Africa created profound doubts about her imperial destiny He shows how attempts to secure vital social reforms prompted the twentieth century's gravest constitutional crisis & coincided with the worst industrial unrest in British history He describes how politicians who conceded the vote to millions more men disregarded women so utterly that female suffragists' public protest bordered on terrorism He depicts a ruling class that fell prey to degeneracy & scandal He analyses a national psyche that embraced the motor-car the sensationalist press & the science fiction of H G Wells but also the Arts & Crafts of William Morris & the nostalgia of A E Housman & he concludes with the crisis that in the summer of 1914 threatened the existence of the United Kingdom
- a looming civil war in Ireland He lights up the era through vivid pen-portraits of the great men & women of the day
- including Gladstone Parnell Asquith & Churchill but also Mrs Pankhurst Beatrice Webb Baden-Powell Wilde & Shaw
- creating a richly detailed panorama of a great power that through both accident & arrogance was forced to face potentially fatal challenges A devastating critique of prewar Britain disturbingly relevant to the world in which we live' Gerard De Groot The Times You won't put it down A really riveting read' Rana Mitter BBC Radio 3 Free Thinking


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The splendid finale to Eric Hobsbawm's study of the nineteenth century THE AGE OF EMPIRE covers the area of Western Imperialism & examines the forces that swept the world to the outbreak of World War One- & shaped modern society ...

THE AGE OF EXTREMES is eminent historian Eric Hobsbawm's personal vision of the twentieth century Remarkable in its scope & breathtaking in its depth of knowledge this immensely rewarding book reviews the uniquely destructive & creative nature of the troubled twentieth century & makes challenging predicitions for the future ...

What happened to the European mind between 1605 when an audience watching Macbeth at the Globe might believe that regicide was such an aberration of the natural order that ghosts could burst from the ground & 1649 when a large crowd perhaps including some who had seen Macbeth forty-four years earlier could stand & watch the execution of a king? Or consider the difference between a magus casting a star chart & the day in 1639 when Jonathan Horrock & William Crabtree watched the transit of Venus across the face of the sun from their attic successfully testing its course against Kepler's Tables of Planetary Motion in a classic case of confirming a scientific theory by empirical testing In this turbulent period science moved from the alchemy & astrology of John Dee to the painstaking observation & astronomy of Galileo from the classicism of Aristotle still favoured by the Church to the evidence-based collegiate investigation of Francis Bacon & if the old ways still lingered & affected the new mind set
- Descartes's dualism an attempt to square the new philosophy with religious belief; Newton the man who understood gravity & the laws of motion still fascinated to the end of his life by alchemy
- by the end of that tumultuous century the greatest ever change in the mental outlook of humanity' had irrevocably taken place

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