Innovation is at the heart of the National Gallery's British collection. William Hogarth developed a fascinating new form of satirical narrative painting; George Stubbs turned horse painting into an epic art form; and, Joseph Wright captured the dram...

In this title, Matthew N. Green provides the first comprehensive analysis of how the Speaker of the House has exercised legislative leadership from 1940 to the present. Green finds that the Speaker's party loyalty is tempered by a host of competing o...

French opera is second only to Italian opera in the length, breadth and diversity of its history. Yet most people, if asked to come up with titles, could mention only a handful of titles – Carmen, Faust, Pelleas et Melisande, Samson et Dalila – a sma...

This beautifully illustrated survey examines the art and artists of the Edo period, one of the great epochs in Japanese art. Together with the imperial city of Kyoto and the port cities of Osaka and Nagasaki, the splendid capital city of Edo (now Tok...

Now updated with new facts, and abridged for use in Soviet history courses, this gripping book assembles top secret Soviet documents, translated into English, from the era of Stalin's purges. The dossiers, police reports, private letters, secret tran...

Set at the beginning of the nineteenth century, when idleness was still looked upon by Russia's serf-owning rural gentry as a plausible and worthy goal, Ivan Goncharov's "Oblomov" follows the travails of an unlikely hero, a young aristocrat incapable...

How do we articulate a religious vision that embraces evolution and human authorship of Scripture? Drawing on the Jewish mystical traditions of Kabbalah and Hasidism, path-breaking Jewish scholar Arthur Green argues that a neomystical perspective can...

This timely and important book highlights the multiple, often overlooked, and frequently misunderstood connections between land use and development policies and policing practices. In order to do so, the book draws upon multiple literatures – especia...

What would it be like to be privy to the mind of one of the twentieth century's greatest thinkers? John Gerassi had just this opportunity; as a child, his mother and father were very close friends with Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, and the...

To most Americans, the United States tax code has become a vast and confounding puzzle. In 1940, the instructions to the form 1040 were about four pages long. Today they have ballooned to more than a hundred pages, and the form itself contains more t...