Reaktion Books - Böcker

The cat has been a favourite subject of artists across cultures from prehistory until the present day. A spectacular 7,000-year-old rock engraving in Libya shows the oldest catfight in feline art; Babylonians believed that the souls of priests wer...

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The fastest animal alive, the falcon deserves attention not just for the combination of speed, power, beauty and ferocity that has made it an object of fascination for thousands of years, but for the light it sheds on the cultures through which it...

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In this robust new account of the Vikings, Tom Shippey explores their mindset, and in particular their fascination with scenes of heroic death. The book recounts many of the great bravura scenes of Old Norse literature, including the Fall of the H...

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For a sparsely populated region on the edge of Europe, Scandinavia has attracted an unusual degree of interest during the twentieth century. The successes and failures of the famous 'Scandinavian' or 'Nordic' model in politics and policy continue ...

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Now in B-format paperback, this book describes ten women over the past three hundred years who have found walking essential to their sense of themselves, as people and as writers. Wanderers traces their footsteps, from eighteenth-century parson's ...

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Eyewitnessing evaluates the place and potency of images among other kinds of historical evidence. By reviewing the many varieties of images across region, period, and medium, and by looking at the pragmatic uses of images (from the Bayeux Tapestry...

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It is tempting to take the tremendous rate of contemporary linguistic change for granted. What is required, in fact, is a radical reinterpretation of what language is. Steven Roger Fischer charts the history of language from the times of Homo erec...

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From the earliest scratches on stone and bone to the languages of computers and the internet, A History of Writing offers an investigation into the origin and development of writing throughout the world. Illustrated with numerous examples, this bo...

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The medieval humoral system of medicine suggested that it was possible to die from having too much - or too little - sex, while the Roman Catholic Church taught that virginity was the ideal state. Holy men and women committed themselves to lifelon...

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Loneliness is a difficult subject to address, because it has such negative connotations. But the truth is that wherever there are people, there is loneliness: everyone is lonely at some point in their lives. You can belonely in a crowd or at home,...

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Among his many captivating exploits, the French artist Yves Klein (1928 - 1962) invented his own brand of colour: the inimitable International Klein Blue. Denounced as a charlatan and feted as a mystic, Klein scandalized the art world with his ent...

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Every culture has monsters that eat us, and every culture repels in horror when we eat ourselves. From Grendel to Sawney Bean, and from the Ghuls of ancient Persia to The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, our fear of being consumed is both universal and te...

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What does it mean to feel something? What stimulates our desires, aspirations, and dreams? Did our ancestors feel in the same way as we do? In a wave of new research over the past decade, historians have tried to answer these questions, seeking to...

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Despite their fearsome reputation, chillies have helped to shape the identities of innumerable world cuisines. Chillies traces the culinary journey of the spice and uncovers cultural and spiritual links between chillies and humans, from their use ...

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In the history of the numinous there are few things more common than the belief in ghosts. From the earliest writings such as the Epic of Gilgamesh to today's ghost-hunting reality TV shows, ghosts have chilled the air of nearly every era and ever...

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There is more history in a bowl of pasta than in the Colosseum, writes Andreas Viestad in Dinner in Rome. From the table of a classic Roman restaurant, Viestad takes us on a fascinating culinary exploration of the Eternal City, and global civiliza...

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More than 80 years before the invention of Coca-Cola, sweet carbonated drinks became popular around the world, provoking remarkably similar arguments that they do today. Are they medicinally, morally, culturally or nutritionally good or bad? They ...

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In the history of food, the tomato is a relative newcomer outside its ancestral home in Mesoamerica. And yet, as we devour pizza by the slice, dip French fries in ketchup, delight in a beautiful Bolognese sauce, or savor tomato curries, it would n...

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Squirrel Nation is a history of Britain's two species of squirrel over the past two hundred years. The red squirrel, although rare, is among the most cherished of native species. Grey squirrels, by contrast, are one of the most frequently see...

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This is a beautifully illustrated account of pearls through millennia, from fossils to contemporary jewellery. Pearls are the most human of gems, both miraculous and familiar. Uniquely organic in origin, they are as intimate as our bodies, created...

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This is the story of a group of women whose experiments in art and life set the tone for the rise of New York as the twentieth century's capital of modern culture. Across the 1910s and '20s, through provocative creative acts, shocking fa...

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This is a new history of the region known as Kyivan Rus', a state in eastern and northern Europe from the late ninth to the mid-sixteenth century that encompassed a variety of polities and peoples, including Lithuanian, Polish, Ottoman and others....

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The Italian Renaissance is conventionally thought of as the historical period that bore witness to the rise of the individual. Yet no other artist of the time begins to compare with Albrecht Durer in terms of the almost obsessive interest he displ...

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Curly tails, snouts, trotters, 'oinks', mud and unpleasant smells - these are the cliches of the pig. With their varied roles as sources of food, as pets and in medical testing, pigs have been materially and culturally associated with humans for t...

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This new and beautifully illustrated account of Venus takes in the most recent research into this mysterious, inhospitable world. Looking at the history of our observations of the planet, from early astronomy to future space missions, it seeks to ...

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Unquestionably one of the most popular composers of classical music, Sergei Rachmaninoff has not always been so admired by critics. Detractors have long perceived Rachmaninoff as part of an outdated Romantic tradition from a bygone Russian world, ...

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In January 2006 a man tried to break Marcel Duchamp's Fountain sculpture with a small hammer. The sculpted foot of Michelangelo's David was damaged in 1991 by a purportedly mentally ill artist. Each such incident confronts us with the unsettling d...

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Yukio Mishima was the most internationally acclaimed Japanese author of the twentieth century: prodigiously talented, dazzlingly prolific and a prime candidate for the Nobel Prize. Yet in 1970 Mishima shocked the world with a bizarre attempt at a ...

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On 4 May 2000, an email that read 'kindly check the attached LOVELETTER' was sent from Philippines. Attached was a virus, the Love Bug, and within days it had paralysed banks, broadcasters and businesses across the globe. The age of Crime Dot Com ...

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Numerous books have attempted to chronicle the life of Dante Alighieri, yet essential questions remain unanswered. How did this self-taught Florentine become the celebrated author of the Divine Comedy? Was his exile from Florence so extraordinary?...

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