Very Short

Since the early Egyptians human beings have formalised the business of learning, setting up a designated environment of some form to pass knowledge and learning on to groups of students. In this second edition of his Very Short Introduction, Gary Thomas explores how and why education has evolved as it has, examining the ways in which it has responded over the centuries to various influences in politics, philosophy, and the social sciences. Focussing on education today, he considers especially the controversies over progressive versus formal teaching, and also examines education worldwide, assessing the accelerating trend on both sides of the Atlantic of the move to charter, academy, and 'free' schools.

Jane Austen wrote six of the best-loved novels in the English language, as well as a smaller corpus of works unpublished in her day, including three volumes of witty, non-realist juvenilia and the innovative, unfinished Sanditon. She pioneered new techniques for representing voices, minds, and hearts in narrative prose, and was a penetrating satirist of social tensions and trends in an era dominated by the French Revolution, the Napoleonic Wars, and the socio-economic disruptions entailed by them. Yet Austen struggled for many years to break into print, and even as she became a published author in the last years of her relatively short life, reading tastes and book-trade expectations constrained as much as they enabled her literary career.

Not long ago, the Solar System was the only example of a planetary system - a star and the bodies orbiting it - that we knew. Now, we know thousands of planetary systems, and have even been able to observe planetary systems at the moment of their birth.

Very Short Introductions: Brilliant, Sharp, Inspiring

Very Short Introductions: Brilliant, Sharp, Inspiring

The Virgin Mary - a Jewish mother - is central to Christianity, a revered woman in Islam, and a person of persistent fascination for centuries. Marian worship and theology has inspired countless appearances in art, as well as religious philosophy and doctrine, while the concept of the Virgin herself has been involved in controversial discussions over the Virginal body, race, anti-Semitism, and globalism.