For most Arab regimes, intelligence, security apparatus and the secret services, are central to their domestic politics. Yet despite this, very little scholarly attention has been paid to the relation
Vladimir Ilyich Lenin visited London on six occasions at the beginning of the twentieth century and it was in this city, where Marx wrote Das Kapital, that the roots of Lenin's political thought took
The second constitutional period of the Ottoman Empire and the early decades of the Turkish republic were a hotbed of new and competing ideas which were to dramatically shape the development of the mo
'Here lies our leader all cut down, the valiant man in the dust.' The elegiac words of the Battle of Maldon, an epic poem written to celebrate the bravery of an English army defeated by Viking raiders
The human race now creates, distributes and stores more information than at any other time in history. Frictionless and cheap digital networks circulate information in ways which either authors or sub
What did people really believe in the Middle Ages? Much of our sense of the medieval period has come down to us from the writings of the learned: the abbots, priors, magnates, scholastic theologians a
Hailed in his lifetime and in every generation thereafter as the supreme Roman poet, Publius Vergilius Maro (70-19 BCE), otherwise known as Virgil, wrote three books of hexameter verse that defined th
Censorship pervades all aspects of political, social and cultural life in the Islamic Republic of Iran. Faced with strict state control of cultural output, Iranian authors and writers have had to adap
The Sufi thinker ‘Abd al-Karim al-Jili (d. 1408) is best-known for his treatment of the idea of the Perfect Human, yet his masterpiece, al-Insan al-kamil (The Perfect Human), is in fact a wide-ranging
Until the 1960s, little was known inside or outside Iran about the tribes living in the country. The anthropological research of Erika Friedl is now renowned for presenting comprehensive data collecte
Anglo-American relations, the so-called Special Relationship, reached a new era with the rise of New Labour and the New Democrats in the late-1980s and early-1990s. Richard Carr reveals the untold sto
Britain is facing big security challenges in the 2020s. The decade to come will not be as favourable as the two past decades. For a country as globalised as Britain, security challenges cover a wide s
Enigmatic, Eminence grise, the 'power behind the throne' these phrases sum up Zhou Enlai's long and varied, but always pivotal, political career in the Chinese Communist Party from the 1920s to 1970s.
The forces of globalization have transformed the world economically, but in the West politics is becoming increasingly fractured as living standards stagnate for all but the very wealthy. As a result,
How is the complex history of the ancient Near East and Islamic World brought to bear in contemporary political discourse?In this book, Medieval Near Eastern historian Jacob Lassner explores the reson
This book traces the history of the famous portrait of the Turkish Sultan Mehmed II by Gentile Bellini, which has appeared, Zelig-like, at critical historical moments from its production in Istanbul t
"The Delirious Museum" is a remarkable, illuminating work, which presents an original view of the idea of the museum in the twenty-first century, re-imagining the possibilities for museums and their d
General Gordon’s death in the Sudan marks the height of imperial cultural fever. Even in the late nineteen seventies, the themes of Khartoum were still the basis for children’s stories, comic books, a
During the EOKA period of Greek Cypriot revolt against British colonial rule, the Greek Cypriots and the British deployed propaganda as a means of swaying allegiances, both within Cyprus and on the in
What are the consequences of Yugoslavia’s existence – and breakup – for the present? This book reflects on this very question, identifying and analysing the political legacies left behind by Yugoslavi
