The best Thomas Hobbes books

Surrealism brings certain visual images to mind: Magritte’s rain of bowler-hatted men, Salvador Dali’s waxed mustaches, and soft watches. But Surrealism began among poets whose aim was to create a political and artistic revolution combining the visions of Freud, Marx, and Sade, in which a horror like World War 1 could never recur.

The movement’s leader was André Breton, and the story of Surrealism is really about what was going on inside Breton’s head at any given time. A man of the utmost gravity – indeed, almost totally without humour – his movement was full of jokes. Irresistibly charming, he was also rigid, bullying, humourless and unforgiving. Passionate about freedom, both personal and artistic, he was totalitarian in his impulses, a dictator in the age of dictators. What was the secret of his charisma? And can these two impulses – to freedom and to total control – possibly be reconciled? 

Peggy is scared: She's struggling to recover from polio and needs crutches to walk, and she and her neighbors are worried about the rumors of Communist spies doing bad things. On top of all that, Peggy has a hard time at school and gets taunted by her classmates. When she finds a mysterious artifact that gives her the ability to fly, she thinks it's the solution to all her problems. But if Peggy wants to keep it, she'll have to overcome bullies, outsmart FBI agents, and escape from some very strange spies!

Adventure awaits and Mup is ready for it. But with one bad wish, a creeping disaster unfolds and Mup finds herself trapped in the future, face-to-face with the one person she never wanted to become: her teenage self. With the world's plants dying all around them, the girls must overcome their differences and work together to uncover the secret to the planet's survival—which may have something to do with a forgotten mystery of the earth's prehistoric past.

Illustrated with captivating artwork and fast-paced comic-book-style action, this story tackles global environmental disasters while zeroing in on the greatest challenge of all: staying true to yourself.

Find a missing book. That was the job the woman in the Doc Martens gave us. Easy money, right? Only now it seems she’s actually an ancient, powerful sorcerer, and the book is a Book of Power that doesn’t want to be found. It wants to tear reality apart at the seams, and it’ll use anyone it can to do it. So now we’ve got one spectacularly displeased sorcerer, a hungry, still-missing book, a dentist with bad hygiene, and a neighbourhood having some reality issues to deal with. Plus about a day before the book turns our world – and us – inside out.

We’ve totally got this. I hope.

Global Crisis examines how a fatal synergy between climate change and human inflexibility eradicated one-third of the planet’s human population and unleashed an unparalleled spate of wars, invasions, and revolutions. Personal accounts and scientific data alike show how extreme weather disrupted growing seasons and destroyed harvests, bringing hunger, malnutrition, forced migration, and disease, and then, as material conditions worsened, precipitated economic chaos, political anarchy, and social collapse. 

Although humans played no part in causing this episode of climate change, they still suffered and died from the primary effect: a 2ºC fall in global temperatures. The fact that today we face an increase of 2ºC will not reduce either the extreme weather events associated with changes of this magnitude, or the adverse consequences for humanity. My book has a moral: where climate change is concerned, in the 21st century as in the 17th century it’s better – and cheaper – to prepare than to repair.

A short, smart guide to living the good life through an introduction to the teachings of Epicurus. As long as there has been human life, we've been in search of what it means to be happy. More than two thousand years ago, the Greek philosopher Epicurus came to his own answer: all we really want in life is pleasure. Though today we tend to associate the word "Epicurean" with indulgence in the form of food and wine, the philosophy that Epicurus established was about a life well lived even in the hardest of times. As John Sellars shows in this concise, approachable guide, the vision of an ideal life developed by Epicurus and his followers was a life much more concerned with mental pleasures and the avoidance of pain. Their goal, in short, was a life of tranquillity or contentment.

The ancient Greek writer Thucydides is widely acclaimed as a model historian, someone who managed to anticipate the key principles of studying the past objectively two and a half thousand years before the development of modern historiography. But in fact, while almost everyone praises Thucydides, they praise him for different and sometimes contradictory things - and they ignore aspects of his work that don't fit their own model of what history should be. In this book I explore the whole tradition of reading Thucydides since the Renaissance, to show how much more complex and debatable his approach to history actually was - and to reveal how it raises questions about our own assumptions about the true nature of history-writing.

In 1656, after being excommunicated from Amsterdam’s Portuguese-Jewish community for “abominable heresies” and “monstrous deeds,” the young Bento (Baruch) de Spinoza abandoned his family’s import business to dedicate his life to philosophy. He soon became notorious across Europe for his views on God, free will, the Bible, and miracles, as well as for his critique of organized religion and his uncompromising defense of freedom of thought and expression. Yet the radicalism of Spinoza’s views has long obscured the fact that his primary reason for turning to philosophy was to answer one of our most urgent questions: How can we lead a good life and enjoy happiness in a world without a providential God?

In this book, I discuss Spinoza’s ideas in the context of his life and times and show how his work can provide us today with a guide to living one’s best life.

Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, first published in 1792, is a work of enduring relevance in women’s rights advocacy. However, as Sylvana Tomaselli shows, a full understanding of Wollstonecraft’s thought is possible only through a more comprehensive appreciation of Wollstonecraft herself, as a philosopher and moralist who deftly tackled major social and political issues and the arguments of such figures as Edmund Burke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and Adam Smith. Reading Wollstonecraft through the lens of the politics and culture of her own time, this book restores her to her rightful place as a major eighteenth-century thinker, reminding us why her work still resonates today.

Exploring a mysterious cave in the mountains behind their house, John and his sister Sarah are shocked to discover they’ve time traveled to ancient Egypt!

Now they must work together to find a way back home from an ancient civilization of golden desert sand and a towering new pyramid, without parents to save them. The adventures abound—cobras, scorpions, a tomb robber, and more! The two kids have to trust each other, make friends who can help, and survive the challenges thrown at them . . . or be stuck in ancient Egypt forever.