Offers a comprehensive account of the evolutionary origins of art and storytelling. This title explains why we tell stories, how our minds are shaped to understand them, and what difference an evolutionary understanding of human nature makes to stories we love.

From the end of WWI to the 1950s, a group of British writers and artists including George Orwell, Barbara Jones, and Dylan Thomas forged a politics that resisted the empty idealism of their age. Celebrating the wisdom and pragmatism of ordinary life, they offered a remedy for the destructive polarization that afflicts us again today.

Palaces of Time resurrects the seemingly banal calendar as a means to understand early modern Jewish life. Elisheva Carlebach has unearthed a trove of beautifully illustrated calendars, to show how Jewish men and women both adapted to the Christian world and also forged their own meanings through time.

David Drake chronicles the lives of ordinary Parisians during WWII, drawing on diaries and reminiscences of people who endured these years. From his account emerge the broad rhythms and shifting moods of the city and the contingent lives of resisters, collaborators, occupiers, and victims who, unlike us, could not know how the story would end.

Fifty years before its golden age, Athens was just another city-state in Sparta's shadow. David Stuttard tells the story of the father and son who lifted Athens. Miltiades defeated the Persians at Marathon; Cimon drove them from Greece, revitalized the war-torn city, and moderated its foreign policy, creating the conditions for Athenian greatness.

The Therigatha, part of the Pali canon of Buddhist scripture, is one of the oldest surviving works by women, composed more than two millennia ago by some of the first Buddhist women-theris-honored for their religious achievements. With a spare and elegant style, this powerful translation introduces us to a classic of world literature.

Plenty Coups, last great Chief of the Crow Nation, said, "When the buffalo went away the hearts of my people fell to the ground and they could not lift them up again. After this nothing happened." In Lear's view, this story raises an ethical question that challenges us all: how should one face the possibility that one's culture might collapse?

Sociologist Mike Savage shows how economic inequality aggravates cultural, social, and political conflicts, challenging the framework of liberal democracy. By fracturing social bonds, inequality turns back the clock, reviving conditions we have struggled for centuries to escape, including empire, dynastic elitism, and explosive ethnic division.