Very Short

The French Revolution is a time of history made familiar from Dickens, Baroness Orczy, and Tolstoy, as well as the legends of let them eat cake, and tricolours. Beginning in 1789, this period of extreme political and social unrest saw the end of the French monarchy, the death of an extraordinary number of people beneath the guillotine's blade during the Terror, and the rise of Napoleon, as well as far reaching consequences still with us today, such as the enduring ideology of human rights, and decimalization.

Very Short Introductions: Brilliant, Sharp, Inspiring

Is the neurophysiology of pain all there is to pain? How do words and mental pictures come to represent things in the world? Do computers think, and if so, are their thought processes significantly similar to our thought processes? Or is there something distinctive about human thought that precludes replication in a computer? These are some of the puzzles that motivate the philosophical discipline called “philosophy of mind,” a central area of philosophy.

Over the past sixty years, the spectacular growth of the technologies associated with the computer is visible for all to see and experience. Yet, the science underpinning this technology is less visible and little understood outside the professional computer science community.

Diplomatic history explores the management of relations between nation-states by the process of negotiations. From the diplomacy of the American Revolution, the diplomatic origins of the Great War and its aftermath, Versailles, and the personal summitry behind the night Stalin and Churchill Divided Europe, to George W. Bush and the Iraq War, and diplomacy in the age of globalization, the management of power relationships has had an immense impact on our recent history.

Very Short Introductions: Brilliant, Sharp, Inspiring

Very Short Introductions: Brilliant, Sharp, Inspiring