Best-seller européen dès sa parution, l'Éloge de la folie (1511) met en scène la déesse Folie s'adressant facétieusement aux hommes pour leur montrer qu'elle gouverne le monde. «Véritable dispensatrice de bonheur», fille d'Ivresse et d'Ignorance, Folie préside à toutes les circonstances de l'existence humaine : elle rend possibles le mariage et la maternité, régit chaque métier, soumet les rois et les prélats à son empire.
Dans cette courte déclamation parodique, parangon de l'éloge paradoxal et du jeu sérieux qu'affectionnent les humanistes, Érasme se plaît à louer «la Folie d'une manière qui n'est pas tout à fait folle».
Qu'est-ce que penser ? Qu'est-ce que la pensée ? Ce que nous évoquons habituellement comme notre chance, cette capacité incomparable qui nous distingue des animaux, George Steiner en interroge les effets sur nos vies et tente de comprendre quelques-unes des raisons qui ancrent nécessairement la tristesse dans le processus de la pensée : doute et frustration, brièveté de l'extrême concentration intellectuelle, rareté de l'invention, énigme de la nature, présence ou absence de Dieu, etc.
En explorant ce en quoi, par quoi la pensée peut nous laisser déçus, sombres ou désemparés, George Steiner déploie magistralement toute son étendue et révèle ce qu'elle est, profondément.
Critique littéraire hors pair, théoricien de la traduction à laquelle il a consacré l'un de ses chefs-d'oeuvre Après Babel (Albin Michel), comparatiste inégalé des littératures française, allemande et anglo-saxonne, George Steiner (1929-2020) a passé sa vie à mieux nous faire comprendre les grands textes qui, de Sophocle à Kafka, constituent notre culture - pour nous faire sentir sa richesse, mais aussi ses fragilités devant certains périls.
Ce manuel aborde toutes les grandes thématiques espagnoles et hispano-américaines, tout en fournissant des exemples utiles pour la compréhension et le commentaire de documents. En vingt chapitres lisibles séparément, les principaux concepts nécessaires à l'approfondissement du sujet traité sont exposés. La première partie décrit la réalité espagnole par une mise en perspective historique, la seconde évoque de manière transversale les différentes facettes politiques, économiques et sociales de l'Amérique latine.
Rédigé en espagnol, chaque chapitre est pourvu d'une synthèse introductive en français, de notes facilitant la compréhension des termes les plus difficiles, ainsi que de questions d'auto-évaluation. En annexes : des cartes, des chronologies politiques, un glossaire de concepts, un lexique des principaux personnages et des statistiques détaillées.
Cette nouvelle édition, entièrement revue et actualisée, a été augmentée
de quatre nouveaux chapitres consacrés aux partis politiques et à
l'environnement en Espagne, ainsi qu'au Venezuela et à la vie politique
en Amérique latine.
Yoël Hoffmann analyse en une longue introduction les attitudes et les coutumes entourant la mort dans le Japon historique et actuel et en donne des exemple dans la littérature. Les idées bouddhistes zen sur la mort sont présentées, la première partie de l'anthologie étant une collection de poèmes d
Ce traité de Cicéron est le manifeste le plus talentueux que l'Antiquité nous ait légué en faveur de l'Académie sceptique. Il est en effet une source indispensable pour l'histoire de la philosophie grecque : sans lui, nous ne saurions presque rien de philosophes aussi importants qu'Arcésilas, Carnéade, Philon de Larissa et Antiochus d'Ascalon. Mais il est non moins intéressant par l'acribie, et parfois la passion, avec laquelle Cicéron défend le « scepticisme » de la Nouvelle Académie face aux arguments des dogmatiques en faveur de la « perception » objective des phénomènes. Loin de se contenter d'exposer le statut des diverses questions d'après des doxographies, Cicéron tente de cerner les véritables enjeux philosophiques et scientifiques des positions académiciennes face à celles des Stoïciens.
La présente traduction française de cette édition bilingue est la première traduction complète depuis les années 1930.
A magisterial, single-volume history of the greatest conflict the world has ever known by our foremost military historian.
*****
The Second World War began in August 1939 on the edge of Manchuria and ended there exactly six years later with the Soviet invasion of northern China. The war in Europe appeared completely divorced from the war in the Pacific and China, and yet events on opposite sides of the world had profound effects. Using the most up-to-date scholarship and research, Beevor assembles the whole picture in a gripping narrative that extends from the North Atlantic to the South Pacific and from the snowbound steppe to the North African Desert.
Although filling the broadest canvas on a heroic scale, Beevor's The Second World War never loses sight of the fate of the ordinary soldiers and civilians whose lives were crushed by the titanic forces unleashed in the most terrible war in history.
"What is true, and I'm actually being serious here, is that there is footage and records of objects in the skies that we don't know exactly what they are. We can't explain how they move, their trajectory. And so I think that people still take seriously, trying to investigate and figure out what that is." Barack Obama, May 17, 2021, the "Late Late Show with James Corden."
Since 2017, UFOs are no longer considered fiction. Declared a "serious subject" by the Pentagon, they have now entered public debate on American, German and Japanese news channels.
Passionate about ufology since his childhood, Egon Kragel is a great French specialist on the subject. He has dug up more than 150 UFO cases, some of which are fascinating and have captivated the international press, while others are more frightening and still raise questions.
You'll read about:
- The hairy cone of Vins-sur-Caramy
- The wave of foo fighters from the Second World War
- The Belgian wave
- Kenneth Arnold, the father of saucers
- The Flatwoods monster
- Malmstrom: deactivated missiles
- The encounter of Herb Schirmer
- The UFOs of the Hudson Valley
- UFOs: Abductions in the sky
- Betty Cash and Vickie Landrum: A scathing remake of Apocalypse Now
- Colares: Deadly encounters in the Amazon
- UFOs and Pilots: A two-step in the sky
Egon Kragel is one of the great specialists in ufology in France. His work is recognized throughout the world, notably by his friend Jacques Vallée who inspired the director Stephen Spielberg for the film E.T. He wrote his first book Ovnis, enquête sur un secret d'Etat. He participates in numerous conferences, appears regularly on television, and takes part in radio programs and podcasts.
Mistresses and wives, mothers and daughters - Antonia Fraser brilliantly explores the relationships which existed between The Sun King and the women in his life. This includes not only Louis XIV's mistresses, principally Louise de La Vallière, Athénaïs de Montespan, and the puritanical Madame de Maintenon, but also the wider story of his relationships with women in general, including his mother Anne of Austria, his two sisters-in-law who were Duchesses d'Orléans in succession, Henriette-Anne and Liselotte, his wayward illegitimate daughters, and lastly Adelaide, the beloved child-wife of his grandson.
The epic story of Jerusalem told through the lives of the men and women who created, ruled and inhabited it.
Jerusalem is the universal city, the capital of two peoples, the shrine of three faiths; it is the prize of empires, the site of Judgement Day and the battlefield of today's clash of civilizations. From King David to Barack Obama, from the birth of Judaism, Christianity and Islam to the Israel-Palestine conflict, this is the epic history of 3,000 years of faith, slaughter, fanaticism and coexistence.
How did this small, remote town become the Holy City, the 'centre of the world' and now the key to peace in the Middle East? In a gripping narrative, Simon Sebag Montefiore reveals this ever-changing city in its many incarnations, bringing every epoch and character blazingly to life. Jerusalem's biography is told through the wars, love affairs and revelations of the men and women - kings, empresses, prophets, poets, saints, conquerors and whores - who created, destroyed, chronicled and believed in Jerusalem.
Drawing on new archives, current scholarship, his own family papers and a lifetime's study, Montefiore illuminates the essence of sanctity and mysticism, identity and empire in a unique chronicle of the city that many believe will be the setting for the Apocalypse. This is how Jerusalem became Jerusalem, and the only city that exists twice - in heaven and on earth.
The history of France has been eventful and dramatic, exciting and complex. By looking at the most outstanding moments in the long process of evolution which has shaped national identity, this book attempts to highlight the main traits that have made the country what it is today. It takes a look at the questions, controversies and uncertainties of the past. France, however, could not exist without the French people, once the subjects of a monarch, now citizens of the French Republic, and it is their life which is described here. History on this scale necessarily turns the spotlight on the men and women responsible for taking the decisions that govern and guide their fellow-citizens. They are the men and women who have created or been subjected to events, people who have supported or instigated collective movements. It also seemed appropriate to set France in its place within Europe and the rest of the world, to see how other nationalities considered, and continue to consider, the country. Lucien Bély was born in Lyon in 1955. He studied in Ecole normale supérieure and obtained the agrégation d'histoire and a thèse d'Etat. He is now Professor at the Sorbonne in Paris.
Le philosophe Nicolas de Cues a écrit le De ludo globi vers la fin de l'année 1463, à Rome. La métaphore plaisante du jeu de la boule lui permet d'illustrer et de clarifier sa pensée. L'exemple du jeu s'inscrit dans le cadre de la recherche de Dieu. Celle-ci, illustrée à son tour par la métaphore de la chasse dans le De venatione sapientiae, exprime la tension entre l'homme et l'absolu, entre la créature qui est image et le Créateur dont elle est l'image. L'homo viator est homo ludens. La vie est un jeu, comme la recherche de Dieu est une course.Maurice de Gandillac avait traduit des passages de cette oeuvre essentielle et surprenante. Hervé Pasqua en offre une traduction intégrale, précédée d'une introduction éclairante.Hervé Pasqua, professeur de philosophie médiévale, titulaire de la chaire Jean-François Mattéi du Centre universitaire méditerranéen (CUM), est chercheur à l'université de Nice. Traducteur des oeuvres de Nicolas de Cues, il est l'auteur, entre autres, de Maître Eckhart ou le procès de l'Un.
The complete story of how the German Enigma codes were broken. Perfect for fans of THE IMITATION GAME, the new film on Alan Turing's Enigma code, starring Benedict Cumberbatch.
Breaking the German Enigma codes was not only about brilliant mathematicians and professors at Bletchley Park. There is another aspect of the story which it is only now possible to tell. It takes in the exploits of spies, naval officers and ordinary British seamen who risked, and in some cases lost, their lives snatching the vital Enigma codebooks from under the noses of Nazi officials and from sinking German ships and submarines.
This book tells the whole Enigma story: its original invention and use by German forces and how it was the Poles who first cracked - and passed on to the British - the key to the German airforce Enigma. The more complicated German Navy Enigma appeared to them to be unbreakable.
Au départ simple matériau destiné à l'archevêque Angelo Cato, les souvenirs de Philippe de Commynes, au fil de leur rédaction, sont devenus une oeuvre autonome, marquant la naissance d'un genre inédit : celui des Mémoires, où l'historien, non seulement acteur et témoin de l'Histoire, s'en fait aussi le juge et l'arbitre. Dans les six premiers livres, qui relatent le règne de Louis XI, trois portraits se détachent et s'entrelacent : ceux de Louis XI, de Charles de Bourgogne, dit le Téméraire, et du mémorialiste en personne. À travers le duel entre la force du Téméraire, que Commynes abandonna en 1472, et la ruse de Louis XI, qu'il rejoignit alors et dont il fut le conseiller pendant plus de dix ans, c'est le destin tragique de la maison de Bourgogne qui est suivi pas à pas. Tout à la fois récit historique, autojustification, recueil de conseils politiques, de maximes et de réflexions sur la conditions humaine, cette somme autobiographique annonçant les Essais de Montaigne livre un éclairage irremplaçable sur la seconde moitié du XVe siècle.
Au départ simple matériau destiné à l'archevêque Angelo Cato, les souvenirs de Philippe de Commynes, au fil de leur rédaction, sont devenus une oeuvre autonome, marquant la naissance d'un genre inédit : celui des Mémoires, où l'historien, non seulement acteur et témoin de l'Histoire, s'en fait aussi le juge et l'arbitre. Dans les six premiers livres, qui relatent le règne de Louis XI, trois portraits se détachent et s'entrelacent : ceux de Louis XI, de Charles de Bourgogne, dit le Téméraire, et du mémorialiste en personne. À travers le duel entre la force du Téméraire, que Commynes abandonna en 1472, et la ruse de Louis XI, qu'il rejoignit alors et dont il fut le conseiller pendant plus de dix ans, c'est le destin tragique de la maison de Bourgogne qui est suivi pas à pas. Tout à la fois récit historique, autojustification, recueil de conseils politiques, de maximes et de réflexions sur la condition humaine, cette somme autobiographique annonçant les Essais de Montaigne livre un éclairage irremplaçable sur la seconde moitié du XVe siècle.
The first in Eric Hobsbawm's dazzling trilogy on the history of the nineteenth century.
Between 1789 and 1848 the world was transformed both by the French Revolution and also by the Industrial Revolution that originated in Britain. This 'Dual Revolution' created the modern world as we know it.
Eric Hobsbawm traces with brilliant analytical clarity the transformation brought about in every sphere of European life by the Dual Revolution - in the conduct of war and diplomacy; in new industrial areas and on the land; among peasantry, bourgeoisie and aristocracy; in methods of government and of revolution; in science, philosophy and religion; in literature and the arts. But above all he sees this as the period when industrial capitalism established the domination over the rest of the world it was to hold for a century.
Eric Hobsbawm's enthralling and original account is an impassioned but objective history of the most significant sixty years in the history of Europe.
Winner of the British Book Awards History Book of the Year
Longlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize
This thrilling biography of Stalin and his entourage during the terrifying decades of his supreme power transforms our understanding of Stalin as Soviet dictator, Marxist leader and Russian tsar.
Based on groundbreaking research, Simon Sebag Montefiore reveals in captivating detail the fear and betrayal, privilege and debauchery, family life and murderous cruelty of this secret world. Written with extraordinary narrative verve, this magnificent feat of scholarly research has become a classic of modern history writing. Showing how Stalin's triumphs and crimes were the product of his fanatical Marxism and his gifted but flawed character, this is an intimate portrait of a man as complicated and human as he was brutal and chilling.
'This is a wonderful, surging narrative - a brilliant and meticulous synthesis of the ancient sources . . . This is a story that should be read by anyone interested in history, politics or human nature - and it has never been better told' - Boris Johnson, Mail on Sunday
Rome was first ruled by kings, then became a republic. But in the end, after conquering the world, the Republic collapsed. Rome was drowned in blood. So terrible were the civil wars that the Roman people finally came to welcome the rule of an autocrat who could give them peace. 'Augustus,' their new master called himself: 'The Divinely Favoured One'.
The lurid glamour of the dynasty founded by Augustus has never faded. No other family can compare for sheer unsettling fascination with its gallery of leading characters. Tiberius, the great general who ended up a bitter recluse, notorious for his perversions; Caligula, the master of cruelty and humiliation who rode his chariot across the sea; Agrippina, the mother of Nero, manoeuvering to bring to power the son who would end up having her murdered; Nero himself, racing in the Olympics, marrying a eunuch, and building a pleasure palace over the fire-gutted centre of his capital.
Now, in the sequel to Rubicon, Tom Holland gives a dazzling portrait of Rome's first imperial dynasty. Dynasty traces the full astonishing story of its rule of the world: both the brilliance of its allure, and the blood-steeped shadows cast by its crimes. Ranging from the great capital rebuilt in marble by Augustus to the dank and barbarian-haunted forests of Germany, it is populated by a spectacular cast: murderers and metrosexuals, adulterers and druids, scheming grandmothers and reluctant gladiators.
Dynasty is the portrait of a family that transformed and stupefied Rome.
François Noudelmann, who has been teaching in American universities for twenty-five years, is struck by the new practice of lying in politics, and particularly since the election of Donald Trump in 2016. Untruths are disseminated as «alternative facts»: to each his own interpretation. We've entered the era of post-truths, opening the door to fake news and the crudest manipulations.
The aim of this essay is to retrace the path that has led to this relativism over the last forty years: the reign of storytelling, the empire of emotion, identity politics, victim ideology, cancel culture, philosophical deconstruction, autofiction and exofiction, the virtualization of the world by artificial intelligence... have all demolished Western reason.
To save the truth and the positivity of facts, François Noudelmann explores in this essay other particularly instructive and innovative avenues, such as indignation in the face of lies, and the alliance of doubt and revolt, which allow us to still believe in a common language.
L'article Sur le mal radical dans la nature humaine, que Kant fit paraître en 1792 dans le Berlinische Monatsschrift, constitue une sorte de préambule à sa philosophie de la religion. Boudé par les commentateurs, ce texte a mauvaise presse pour de mauvaises raisons qui tiennent à son sujet, souvent mal compris, et à la question de sa place dans le système kantien.
La présente édition, bilingue et assortie d'un commentaire suivi, loin de prétendre donner le dernier mot sur la question, se veut un instrument de travail : elle est propre à intéresser, outre les philosophes, aussi bien les germanistes que les chercheurs en anthropologie et en sciences religieuses.
A portrait of a civilisation which flourished within living memory and left an indelible mark on history
In the 13th century Yiddish language and culture began to spread from the Rhineland and Bavaria slowly east into Austria, Bohemia and Moravia, then to Poland and Lithuania and finally to western Russia and the Ukraine, becoming steadily less German and more Slav in the process. In its late-medieval heyday the culturally vibrant, economically successful, intellectually adventurous and largely self-ruling Yiddish society stretched from Riga on the Baltic down to Odessa on the Black Sea.
In the 1650s the Chmielnicki Massacres in the Ukraine by the Cossacks killed 100,000 Jews, forcing those that were left to spread out into the small towns (shtetls) and villages. The break-up of Poland-Lithuania - a safe haven for Jews in previous centuries - in the late 18th century further disrupted Yiddish society, as did the Russian anti-Jewish pogroms from the 1880s onwards, at the very time when Yiddish was producing a rich stream of plays, poems and novels.
Paul Kriwaczek describes the development, over the centuries, of Yiddish language, religion, occupations and social life, art, music and literature. The book ends by describing how the Yiddish way of life became one of the foundation stones of modern American, and therefore of world, culture.
The bestselling author of STALINGRAD and BERLIN: THE DOWNFALL on the Spanish Civil War, drawing on masses of newly discovered material from the Spanish, Russian and German archives.
The civil war that tore Spain apart between 1936 and 1939 and attracted liberals and socialists from across the world to support the cause against Franco was one of the most hard-fought and bitterest conflicts of the 20th century: a war of atrocities and political genocide and a military testing ground before WWII for the Russians, Italians and Germans, whose Condor Legion so notoriously destroyed Guernica.
Antony Beevor's account narrates the origins of the Civil War and its violent and dramatic course from the coup d'etat in July 1936 through the savage fighting of the next three years which ended in catastrophic defeat for the Republicans in 1939. And he succeeds especially well in unravelling the complex political and regional forces that played such an important part in the origins and history of the war.
Born almost a hundred years ago in Vienna - the cultural heart of a bourgeois Mitteleurope - Eric Hobsbawm, who was to become one of the most brilliant and original historians of our age, was uniquely placed to observe an era of titanic social and artistic change. As the century progressed, the forces of Communism and Dadaism, Ibiza and cyberspace, would do battle with the bourgeois high culture fin-de-siècle Vienna represented - the opera, the Burgtheater, the museums of art and science, City Hall. In Fractured Times Hobsbawm unpicks a century of cultural fragmentation and dissolution with characteristic verve and vigour.
Hobsbawm examines the conditions that created the great cultural flowering of the belle époque and held the seeds of its disintegration, from paternalistic capitalism to globalisation and the arrival of a mass consumer society. Passionate but never sentimental, Hobsbawm ranges freely across his subject: he records the passing of the golden age of the 'free intellectual' and examines the lives of great, forgotten men; he analyses the relation between art and totalitarianism and dissects cultural phenomena as diverse as surrealism, women's emancipation and the American cowboy myth.
Written with consummate imagination and skill, Fractured Times is the last book from one of our greatest modern-day thinkers.
Traduction inédite et commentaires par Ari Simhon Opuscule méconnu de Hegel rédigé à Bamberg entre 1807 et 1808, Qui pense abstrait ? expose, en quelques pages, une ébauche de sociologie hégélienne, avec une pointe d'humour qui révèle le philosophe sous un jour nouveau et inattendu. Hegel y pourfend, avec une ironie acerbe, ceux qui, tout en dénonçant la pensée philosophique comme étant abstraite, se maintiennent dans l'abstraction que la véritable philosophie cherche à dépasser. Il analyse les rapports sociaux et l'influence de la condition sociale des individus sur le caractère abstrait ou non de leur pensée. « Penser ? Abstrait ? Sauve qui peut !, ainsi commence ce bref texte, inattendu et peu connu, écrit en 1807, la même année que la Phénoménologie de l'Esprit et dont Heidegger disait que c'était la « meilleure introduction » à la méthode hégélienne. On y découvre un Hegel primesautier et moqueur, qui croque des scènes de la vie quotidienne pour démontrer que l'abstrait n'est pas là où on l'attend (...). » Éric AESCHIMANN, Libération.
Winner of the Costa Biography Award
What makes a Stalin? Was he a Tsarist agent or Lenin's bandit? Was he to blame for his wife's death? When did the killing start?
Based on revelatory research, here is the thrilling story of how a charismatic cobbler's son became a student priest, romantic poet, prolific lover, gangster mastermind and murderous revolutionary. Culminating in the 1917 revolution, Simon Sebag Montefiore's bestselling biography radically alters our understanding of the gifted politician and fanatical Marxist who shaped the Soviet empire in his own brutal image. This is the story of how Stalin became Stalin.
