在十九世纪，号称日不落帝国的英国拥有了无可争议的海上统治权，然而，这一支规模空前的海上力量逐渐被美国所取代，一些同样企图以对抗形式攫取海上霸权的其他力量却遭遇衰败。这对于二十一世纪的现在依然有着耐人寻味的启示。本书以十九到二十世纪各国海权发展之路作眼，对于美国如果一步一步走向海权大国的历程加以考察和分析，寻求对于当今中国的启示。

Markus Gabriel, Spiegel-Bestseller-Autor, zeigt in diesem Buch, dass das Denken Teil der biologischen Sinne ist, der nicht künstlich nachgebaut werden kann. Längst gilt er als einer der wichtigsten deutschsprachigen Philosophen der Gegenwart, dessen unverwechselbar leichtfüßiger Stil klassische und moderne Theoretiker sowie die Popkultur zusammenführt.
Das Denken ist vielleicht der wahre Hauptbegriff der Philosophie. Insbesondere Platon und Aristoteles haben sie als das Nachdenken über das Nachdenken definiert. Unser menschliches Denken ist einer unserer Sinne und damit unüberwindbar an biologische Bedingungen gebunden. Das lässt sich zwar nicht nachbauen. Dennoch sind wir in bestimmter Hinsicht selber eine Form der künstlichen Intelligenz. Denn unser geistiges Vermögen entsteht historisch und kulturell aus dem Bild, das wir uns von uns selber und von unserer Umgebung machen. Oder ist das ganze Universum vielleicht nur eine Simulation? Mit Esprit führt Markus Gabriel in hochaktuelle Themen ein und streift dabei Hume, Leibniz und Kant ebenso wie Searle und Taylor, aber auch Filme und Serien wie Ghost in the Shell, Matrix oder Der sechs Millionen Dollar Mann.

The first ever critical study of Tolkien’s little-known essay, which reveals how language invention shaped the creation of Middle-earth and beyond, to George R R Martin’s Game of Thrones.
J.R.R. Tolkien’s linguistic invention was a fundamental part of his artistic output, to the extent that later on in life he attributed the existence of his mythology to the desire to give his languages a home and peoples to speak them. As Tolkien puts it in ‘A Secret Vice’, ‘the making of language and mythology are related functions’’.
In the 1930s, Tolkien composed and delivered two lectures, in which he explored these two key elements of his sub-creative methodology. The second of these, the seminal Andrew Lang Lecture for 1938–9, ‘On Fairy-Stories’, which he delivered at the University of St Andrews in Scotland, is well known. But many years before, in 1931, Tolkien gave a talk to a philological society entitled ‘A Hobby for the Home’, where he unveiled for the first time to a listening public the art that he had both himself encountered and been involved with since his earliest childhood: ‘the construction of imaginary languages in full or outline for amusement’.
This talk would be edited by Christopher Tolkien for inclusion as ‘A Secret Vice’ in The Monsters and the Critics and Other Essays and serves as the principal exposition of Tolkien’s art of inventing languages. This new critical edition, which includes previously unpublished notes and drafts by Tolkien connected with the essay, including his ‘Essay on Phonetic Symbolism’, goes some way towards re-opening the debate on the importance of linguistic invention in Tolkien’s mythology and the role of imaginary languages in fantasy literature.

John Patrick Douglas Balfour, 3rd Baron Kinross (1904–1976) was a Scottish historian and writer noted for his biography of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk and other works on Islamic history. He was educated at Winchester College and Balliol College, Oxford. He then became a journalist and writer.

'Hugely impressive... Wilson is an assured guide through the millennium-long labyrinth of papal-imperial relations' Literary Review

A great, sprawling, ancient and unique entity, the Holy Roman Empire, from its founding by Charlemagne to its destruction by Napoleon a millennium later, formed the heart of Europe. It was a great engine for inventions and ideas, it was the origin of many modern European states, from Germany to the Czech Republic, its relations with Italy, France and Poland dictated the course of countless wars - indeed European history as a whole makes no sense without it.

In this strikingly ambitious book, Peter H. Wilson explains how the Empire worked. It is not a chronological history, but an attempt to convey to readers why it was so important and how it changed over its existence. The result is a tour de force - a book that raises countless questions about the nature of political and military power, about diplomacy and the nature of European civilization and about the legacy of the Empire, which has continued to haunt its offspring, from Imperial and Nazi Germany to the European Union.

In 1177 B.C., marauding groups known only as the “Sea Peoples” invaded Egypt. The pharaoh’s army and navy managed to defeat them, but the victory so weakened Egypt that it soon slid into decline, as did most of the surrounding civilizations. After centuries of brilliance, the civilized world of the Bronze Age came to an abrupt and cataclysmic end. Kingdoms fell like dominoes over the course of just a few decades. No more Minoans or Mycenaeans. No more Trojans, Hittites, or Babylonians. The thriving economy and cultures of the late second millennium B.C., which had stretched from Greece to Egypt and Mesopotamia, suddenly ceased to exist, along with writing systems, technology, and monumental architecture. But the Sea Peoples alone could not have caused such widespread breakdown. How did it happen?
In this major new account of the causes of this “First Dark Ages,” Eric Cline tells the gripping story of how the end was brought about by multiple interconnected failures, ranging from invasion and revolt to earthquakes, drought, and the cutting of international trade routes. Bringing to life the vibrant multicultural world of these great civilizations, he draws a sweeping panorama of the empires and globalized peoples of the Late Bronze Age and shows that it was their very interdependence that hastened their dramatic collapse and ushered in a dark age that lasted centuries.
A compelling combination of narrative and the latest scholarship, 1177 B.C. sheds new light on the complex ties that gave rise to, and ultimately destroyed, the flourishing civilizations of the Late Bronze Age—and that set the stage for the emergence of classical Greece.

Histories of German philosophy in the nineteenth century typically focus on its first half--when Hegel, idealism, and Romanticism dominated. By contrast, the remainder of the century, after Hegel's death, has been relatively neglected because it has been seen as a period of stagnation and decline. But Frederick Beiser argues that the second half of the century was in fact one of the most revolutionary periods in modern philosophy because the nature of philosophy itself was up for grabs and the very absence of certainty led to creativity and the start of a new era. In this innovative concise history of German philosophy from 1840 to 1900, Beiser focuses not on themes or individual thinkers but rather on the period's five great debates: the identity crisis of philosophy, the materialism controversy, the methods and limits of history, the pessimism controversy, and the Ignorabimusstreit. Schopenhauer and Wilhelm Dilthey play important roles in these controversies but so do many neglected figures, including Ludwig Büchner, Eugen Dühring, Eduard von Hartmann, Julius Fraunstaedt, Hermann Lotze, Adolf Trendelenburg, and two women, Agnes Taubert and Olga Pluemacher, who have been completely forgotten in histories of philosophy. The result is a wide-ranging, original, and surprising new account of German philosophy in the critical period between Hegel and the twentieth century.

In 1939, five-year-old Jacques Austerlitz is sent to England on a Kindertransport and placed with foster parents. This childless couple promptly erase from the boy all knowledge of his identity and he grows up ignorant of his past. Later in life, after a career as an architectural historian, Austerlitz - having avoided all clues that might point to his origin - finds the past returning to haunt him and he is forced to explore what happened fifty years before.

Among the greatest and most moving achievements of contemporary German writing"(Rheinischer Merkur), the four long narratives in W. G. Sebald's The Emigrants appear at first sight to be straightforward biographies of four Germans in exile. But Sebald has wrought something altogether new. Illustrated throughout with enigmatic photographs, it is an astonishingly beautiful book -- "one of the best novels to appear since WWII" (Review of Contemporary Fiction).The Emigrants was chosen three times -- by Susan Sontag, Tariq Ali, and A.S. Byatt -- in the London Times Literary Supplement as the 1996 International Book of the Year. Susan Sontag wrote: "W.G. Sebald's The Emigrants is the most extraordinary, thrilling new book I've read this year...indeed for several years. It is like nothing I've ever read...I know of no book which conveys more about that complex fate, being a European at the end of European civilization. I know of few books written in our time but this is one which attains the sublime".

The growth of technological and scientific knowledge in the past two centuries has been the overriding dynamic element in the economic and social history of the world. Its result is now often called the knowledge economy. But what are the historical origins of this revolution and what have been its mechanisms? In "The Gifts of Athena", Joel Mokyr constructs an original framework to analyze the concept of "useful" knowledge. He argues that the growth explosion in the modern West in the past two centuries was driven not just by the appearance of new technological ideas but also by the improved access to these ideas in society at large - as made possible by social networks comprising universities, publishers, professional sciences, and kindred institutions.Through a wealth of historical evidence set in clear and lively prose, he shows that changes in the intellectual and social environment and the institutional background in which knowledge was generated and disseminated brought about the Industrial Revolution, followed by sustained economic growth and continuing technological change. Mokyr draws a link between intellectual forces such as the European enlightenment and subsequent economic changes of the nineteenth century, and follows their development into the twentieth century. He further explores some of the key implications of the knowledge revolution. Among these is the rise and fall of the "factory system" as an organizing principle of modern economic organization. He analyzes the impact of this revolution on information technology and communications as well as on the public's state of health and the structure of households. By examining the social and political roots of resistance to new knowledge, Mokyr also links growth in knowledge to political economy and connects the economic history of technology to the New Institutional Economics. "The Gifts of Athena" provides crucial insights into a matter of fundamental concern to a range of disciplines including economics, economic history, political economy, the history of technology, and the history of science.

《东印度公司对华贸易编年史》是曾在中国海关担任过税务司的美国人马士所著。书上详尽地记载了自1635年-1834 年期间英国对华贸易的情况，而“事实上是广州与伦敦之间的贸易”（原序）。因此此书是研究早期中英贸易史的珍贵资料，特别是对研究广州十三行中英贸易史，具有极重要的价值。

＞自信是我们人格的一大基本元素，
＞自信的缺失或扭曲，会让我们在为人处世上疑虑重重，
＞给我们带来情感和生活上的伤痛，
＞使我们害怕做错事、 害怕被论断、 害怕爱别人、 害怕被爱……
＞最终，降低了我们的生活质量。
本书旨在帮我们从自信受伤导致的恶性循环中释放出来，
以教学的方式介绍了诸多简便而易行的心理治疗方法，
这些方法为世界各地的心理专家广泛采用，
其科学性和有效性都已被证实，
我们将从中学会更爱自己，学会勇于行动，
学会敢于在他人面前坚立自己。
翻开这本书，我们将踏上一段确切有效的治愈之旅！

One of Time Magazine's Best Books of the Year
In Landscape and Memory Schama ranges over continents and centuries to reveal the psychic claims that human beings have made on nature. He tells of the Nazi cult of the primeval German forest; the play of Christian and pagan myth in Bernini's Fountain of the Four Rivers; and the duel between a monumental sculptor and a feminist gadfly on the slopes of Mount Rushmore. The result is a triumphant work of history, naturalism, mythology, and art.

"A work of great ambition and enormous intellectual scope...consistently provocative and revealing."--New York Times
"Extraordinary...a summary cannot convey the riches of this book. It will absorb, instruct, and fascinate."--New York Review of Books