Baruch Spinoza (1632-1977) is considered one of the great rationalist thinkers of the seventeenth century. His magnum opus, "Ethics", in which he criticized the dualism of Descartes, solidified his reputation and greatly influenced the Enlightenment...

In this novel from esteemed political writer Tariq Ali, a father, Vlady, loses his job when he refuses to renounce socialist beliefs in the newly unified Germany – and as a result wants to explain to his alienated son what their family's long and pas...

The BBC commissioned Tariq Ali to write a three-part TV series on the circumstances leading to the overthrow, trial and execution of Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, the first elected Prime Minister of Pakistan. As rehearsals were about to begin, the BBC hierarc...

"I now no longer use the better words" Ilse Aichinger (1921-2016) was one of the most important writers of postwar Austrian and German literature. Born in 1921 to a Jewish mother, she survived World War II in Vienna, while her twin sister Helga esca...

Iraqi poet Salah Al Hamdani has lived a remarkable life. The author of some forty books in French and Arabic, he began life as a child laborer, with little or no education. As a political prisoner under Saddam Hussein, he learned to read and write Ar...

The list of subjects that Giorgio Agamben has tackled in his career is dizzying – from the dangers of our current political moment to the traces of the distant past that inflect the culture around us today. With "Pulcinella", Agamben is back with yet...

As the Syrian war has raged over the past several years, the world has watched in horror. And that horror is particularly concentrated on the city of Aleppo, which has been subject to almost incomparable devastation and deprivation. Aleppo is Alice...

Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben is the rare writer whose ideas and works have a broad appeal across many fields, and his devoted fans are not just philosophers, but readers of political and legal theory, sociology, and literary criticism as well....

This lyrical novel tells the story of a young man living in Egypt in the 1990s, a time of great turmoil. We see student riots at Cairo University, radical politics, and the first steps towards the making of a writer. But his story is not told in isol...

After years on the job, police detective Jakob Franck has retired. Finally, the dead – with all their mysteries – will no longer have any claim on him. Or so he thinks. On a cold autumn afternoon, a case he thought he'd long put behind him returns t...