Half a century of research has resulted in machines capable of beating the best human chess players, and humanoid robots that can interact. But can machines really think? Is the mind just a complic...
Jack Urwin writes like he speaks: accessible, funny and interesting. His Vice article got people talking and now, almost two years on, he is right in thinking that the time for a big discussion abo...
The only scientist to ever appear on the British twenty pound note, Michael Faraday is one of the most recognisable names in the history of science. Faraday’s forte was electricity, a revolut...
Imagine freewheeling through tufted French vineyards, scaling the rocky, cloud-topped tracks in the Himalayas or rattling past whitewashed sugar-cube houses in narrow Spanish valleys. From survivin...
Illustrated guide to the crucial French philosopher who denied bring a philosopher at all. ‘I am like no one else in the whole world …’ Thus begins Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s ...
Introducing Hinduism offers a guide to the key philosophical, literary, mythological and cultural traditions of this extraordinarily diverse faith. It untangles the complexities of Hinduism’s...
Enlightenment botany was replete with sexual symbolism--to the extent that many botanical textbooks were widely considered pornographic. Carl Linnaeus's controversial new system for classifying pla...
From the Large Hadron Collider rap to the sins of Isaac Newton, The Science Magpie is a compelling collection of scientific curiosities. Expand your knowledge as you view the history of the Earth o...
Shakespeare’s absolute pre-eminence is simply unparalleled. His plays pack theatres and provide Hollywood with block-buster scripts; his works inspire mountains of scholarship and criticism e...
What really happens at the most fundamental levels of nature? Introducing Particle Physics explores the very frontiers of our knowledge, even showing how particle physicists are now using theory an...
Christianity depends on the belief that the Jesus of history is identical with the Christ of faith, and that God in the person of Jesus intervened finally and decisively in human history. But is th...
“Introducing Genetics” takes readers on a journey through this new science to the discovery of DNA and the heart of the human gene map. In everyday life, many of us increasingly have to...
René Descartes is famous as the philosopher who was prepared to doubt everything- even his own physical existence. Most people also know that he said ‘I think, therefore I am’, e...
INTRODUCING guide to the history and theory of the still controversial ‘speaking cure’. The ideas of psychoanalysis have permeated Western culture. It is the dominant paradigm through w...
In 1859, Charles Darwin shocked the world with a radical theory – evolution by natural selection. One hundred and fifty years later, his theory still challenges some of our most precious beli...
No one ever expected the atom to be as bizarre, as capricious, and as weird as it turned out to be. Its tale is one riddled with jealousy, rivalry, missed opportunities and moments of genius.Piers ...
Islam is one of the world’s great monotheistic religions. Islamic culture, spanning 1,500 years, has produced some of the finest achievements of humanity. Yet the religion followed by a fifth...
Capitalism now dominates the globe, both in economics and ideology, shapes every aspect of our world and influences everything from laws, wars and government to interpersonal relationships. Introdu...
Can it be that the human brain possesses an in-built faculty for language? Noam Chomsky, one of the most brilliant linguists of the 20th century, believes that it does- that there exists a ‘u...
Was Marx himself a ‘Marxist’? Was his visionary promise of socialism betrayed by Marxist dictatorship? Is Marxism inevitably totalitarian? What did Marx really say? “Introducing M...