Essays & Culture

The Unwritten Places is an account of the life and times of the people of the Pindos mountains in northern Greece, as the author experienced them during ten years of wandering the ancient mule paths and summer pastures. It tells in particular of his friendship with a family of Vlach shepherds from the mountains close to Albania. The title is a translation of "Ta Agrafa", the name of what is still the most inaccessible and least developed part of the country.

The Use of Photography recounts a passionate love affair between Annie Ernaux and the journalist and author Marc Marie, after the two met in January 2003. Ernaux had been receiving intensive chemo for breast cancer during the prior three months, and had lost all her hair from the treatments. At the end of January she had surgery, followed by radiation therapy. The affair took place in different locations and Ernaux describes how, shortly after it began, she found herself entranced each morning by the sight of clothes strewn about, chairs out of place and the remains of their last meal of the evening still on the table – and how painful it felt to put things back in order afterwards. She went and got her camera, and began to take photographs of the scenes of disarray. When she told Marc Marie what she had done, he said he had felt the same desire. Translated by Alison L. Strayer into English for the first time, The Use of Photography is an extraordinary meditation on eroticism, photography and writing, a major work by the 2022 Nobel Prize in Literature laureate.

During the middle decades of the nineteenth century, a generation of Ottoman Greeks was caught up in radical social and political changes, including the period of reforms known as Tanzimat. The Ottoman Greek press was both a product and an agent of these changes. The Uses of Oppression follows the development of the Ottoman Greek press from its birth in 1830 until 1862, employing the vivid reflections of its editors, correspondents, advertisers, commentators, and readers as a lens through which to view the everyday lives of this generation of Ottoman Greeks—their social aspirations, their reactions to political events, their reception of Western-style norms, and other contemporary issues.

From the philosophy of Aristotle and Confucius, to Thomas Aquinas' Summa Theologiae, to the paintings of Raphael, Botticelli and many more, fascination with the virtues has endured and evolved to fit a wide range of cultural, religious, and philosophical contexts through the centuries. This Very Short Introduction introduces readers to the various virtues: the moral virtues, the intellectual virtues, and the theological virtues, as well as the capital vices. It explores the role of the virtues in moral life, their cultivation, and how they offer ways of thinking and acting that are alternatives to mere rule-following.

It also considers the relationship of the virtues to our own emotions, desires, and rational capacities. ABOUT THE SERIES: The Very Short Introductions series from Oxford University Press contains hundreds of titles in almost every subject area. These pocket-sized books are the perfect way to get ahead in a new subject quickly.

Our expert authors combine facts, analysis, perspective, new ideas, and enthusiasm to make interesting and challenging topics highly readable.

"The period from 1933 to 1943 was one of the darkest and most chaotic in human history, as the Second World War unfolded with unthinkable cruelty. It was also a crucial decade in the dramatic, intersecting lives of some of history's greatest philosophers. In particular, four women whose parallel ideas would come to dominate the twentieth century--at once in necessary dialogue and striking contrast with one another. Simone de Beauvoir ... was laying the foundations for nothing less than the future of feminism. Born Alissa Rosenbaum in St. Petersburg before emigrating to the US in 1926, Ayn Rand was honing one of the most politically influential voices of the 20th century. ... Hannah Arendt was developing some of today's most important leftwing ideas, culminating with the publication of The Origins of Totalitarianism and her arrival as a peerless intellectual celebrity. Perhaps the greatest thinker of all was a classmate of de Beauvoir: Simone Weil, who turned away from fame to devote herself entirely to refugee aid and the resistance movement during the war"--

With an Introduction by David Amigoni. Charles Darwin's travels around the world as an independent naturalist on HMS Beagle between 1831 and 1836 impressed upon him a sense of the natural world's beauty and sublimity which language could barely capture. Words, he said, were inadequate to convey to those who have not visited the inter-tropical regions, the sensation of delight which the mind experiences'. Yet in a travel journal which takes the reader from the coasts and interiors of South America to South Sea Islands, Darwin's descriptive powers are constantly challenged, but never once overcome. In addition, The Voyage of the Beagle displays Darwin's powerful, speculative mind at work, posing searching questions about the complex relation between the Earth's structure, animal forms, anthropology and the origins of life itself.

A clash of empires in Italy Variously called, 'The Second Italian War of Independence, ' 'The Franco-Austrian War.' 'The Austro-Sardinian War' and 'The Austro-Piedmontese War' this notable European conflict of the middle years of the nineteenth century played a pivotal role in the shaping of modern Europe. The declining Austro-Hungarian empire of the Hapsburgs struggled to maintain its hold on the Italian states as they fought to create a unified nation. An alliance of Sardinia and France fought the Austrian Empire in northern Italy where, for the final time, both protagonists were commanded in the field by their respective emperors. The conflict was short, lasting only from May to July in 1859, but it included the notable battles of Magenta and Solferino which were both allied victories. The outcome of the war was a negotiated peace prompted by France's desire not to draw Prussia into the war. This book is drawn from reports made by the Times reporter on the spot and enhanced by forty illustrations by Carlo Bossoli who was a well known scenic artist of the period. Leonaur editions are newly typeset and are not facsimiles; each title is available in softcover and hardback with dustjacket; our hardbacks are cloth bound and feature gold foil lettering on their spines and fabric head and tail bands.

A systematic treatment of the question, "What is knowledge?," this masterpiece from Plato's later period features a dialogue between Socrates and his student, Theaetetus. Translation by Francis M. Cornford, who provides extensive commentaries.

"...this dialectic of blood and lightwhich is the history of your people..."Sherrard to Seferis, 20 March 1950Philip Sherrard first came across George Seferis's poetry when as a young man still in the army he was transferred to Greece in 1946. It made such a powerful impression on him that when he returned to England he started corresponding with Seferis, began translating his poetry into English, and ultimately decided to do his PhD on modern Greek poetry. Much later Sherrard was to translate, together with Edmund Keeley, Seferis's Collected Poems for Princeton University Press. The Seferis - Sherrard correspondence is not vast, but nevertheless revealing of both men's orientation, most particularly Sherrard's as he became increasingly interested in the Christian Orthodox East, and who simultaneously with his involvement in Greek literature and especially modern Greek poetry went on to write a number of important theological studies. Included with the correspondence are the texts that the two men sent to each other and three studies of Seferis's poetry written by Sherrard, the one published here for the first time. The book is introduced by the Emeritus Professor of Modern Greek at Oxford, Peter Mackridge, and the theologian Vincent Rossi, as well as by Sherrard himself in a text published here for the first time.From "The Other Mind of Europe", Philip Sherrard’s introductory essay to his correspondence with George Seferis:"I still remember my bewilderment when Seferis sent me a letter in which occur such phrases as: "I have a very organic feeling which identifies my human life with the life of nature", and went on to speak of the Greek world - the world of Greek nature - as "lines which occur and recur; bodies and features, the tragic silence of a face ... There is a process of humanization in the Greek light ... Just think of those cords that bind man and the elements of nature together, this tragedy which is at once natural and human, this intimacy. Just think how the light of day and man’s blood are one and the same thing. "or when some passages from his diary were given to me, one of which read: I know that all my life will not be sufficient to express what I have been trying to express for so long: this union of nature with the simple human body." It is as if Seferis thought, not by discursive reasoning, but intuitively, in terms of natural objects, in terms of sensual images. It is as if the subject of his thought revealed itself to him not as an abstraction divorced from the rest of life, but in all its relationships not only to other ideas but to nature as well.’