When Coca-Cola entered the French market with a hard-core bottom-line management style, they were met with boycotts in cafes and supermarkets. At the launch of EuroDisney in Paris, Mickey Mouse was 'greeted' by angry protesters hurling tomatoes and eggs. What went wrong? As a culture, the French are fiercely independent yet romantic, conservative yet avant-garde, rational yet emotional. In "Au Contraire!: Figuring Out the French", bilingual and bicultural authors Gilles Asselin and Ruth Mastron explore beyond the stereotypes, exami... read more

The first email was sent less than forty years ago; by 2011, there will be 3.2 billion users. The flood of messages is ceaseless. As the toll of email mounts, reducing our time for leisure and contemplation, and separating us from each other in the lonely battle with the inbox, John Freeman enters a plea for communication that is more selective and nuanced and, above all, more sociable. Drawing on the research of linguists, scientists, critics and philosophers, Freeman's history of correspondence reveals how changing methods of com... read more

Everything You Need to Know about the Greatest Civilisation That Ever WasWhy are some laws draconian? What is an Achilles heel? And why were the Spartans spartan? Answering all these questions and more, Charlotte Higgins examines the legacy of the ancient Greeks.

In this fascinating look at mass collaboration on the Internet, Marshall Poe takes us on an incredible trip that begins with the origins of human society and ends with the emergence of WikiWorld, the universal sphere in which billions of people create, trade and transform information. The collaborative instincts that underlie web phenomena such as Wikipedia, MySpace, and YouTube, Poe argues, are an integral part of the human condition. We are social beings, after all, and can barely resist the urge to pitch in and be part of someth... read more

Like the 'tipping point', the 'long tail' is a concept that is so obvious and so right that it seems extraordinary that no-one has articulated it before. The Long Tail refers to the hundreds of thousands of products that are not number one bestsellers i.e. all those products that form a line that tails off down any company's sales graph. But in the digital and on-line world, these products are booming precisely because they are not constrained by the demands of a physical retail space. Last autumn, Chris Anderson identified this ... read more

: From "Advertising" to "Zapping," "Sex" to "Shopping," "Fat" to "Future," and "Toys" to "Terrorism" . . . "The A to Z of Postmodern Life "explores the alphabet of ideas, products, and "isms" that shape global culture today. Prolific author, columnist, and social commentator Ziauddin Sardar presents a humorous and challenging collection of essays that are grounded in personal observation, acute analysis, and anecdote. If you have ever wondered what the world is coming to, then let Sardar tell you. He is fast, fearless, and unafra... read more

Indigenous peoples are uniting around a commonality of concerns, needs and ambitions. In New Zealand and Canada, the politics challenge the colonial structures that social and political systems are built upon. This book casts light on the constitutional politics in both countries that are redefining the relationship of these peoples to the state.

In the tradition of Dava Sobel and Longitude, award-winning writer Martin Edmond uses his extraordinary intellectual breadth and imaginative reach to elegantly and lucidly execute his most ambitious project to date - the history of 4,000 years of the Western imagination and the Antipodes, Great Southern Land, Zone of the Marvellous.

<b>The utter bloody rudeness of everyday life (or six good reasons to stay home and bolt the door)</b><br><br><i>"Talk to the hand 'cause the face ain't listening,"</i> the saying goes. <br>When did the world become so rude? <br>It's a topic that has been simmering for years, and Lynne Truss says that it has now reached boiling point. Taking on the boorish behaviour that has become a point of pride for some, <i>Talk to the Hand</i> is a rallying cry for courtesy.... read more

Barbed wire cuts across more than just property, war and politics. This most vicious tool of control has played a critical role in the modern experience, be it territorial expansion or the settlement of local and international conflicts. However, it has other histories: those constructed through image and text in the arts, media and popular culture. These representations in painting, photography, poetry, personal memoirs, cartoons, novels, advertisements and film have never before been critically examined. In this book, Alan Krel... read more

How Today's Internet is Killing Our Culture and Assaulting Our EconomyAmateur hour has arrived, and the audience is running the show!Silicon Valley insider and pundit Andrew Keen exposes the grave consequences of today's new digital media in this lively, readable and witty polemic, which reveals how an avalanche of amateur content is threatening our values, economy, and ultimately innovation and creativity itself. Highly topical, provocative and controversial - the counter-argument to The Long Tail, The Wisdom of Crowds and the 'ma... read more

What exactly is a credit crunch? Why do footballers earn so much more than the rest of us? Which country is likely to be the world's leading economy in 10 years' time? And how does economics affect each one of us, every day? In the seventh volume of the successful 50 Ideas series, Daily Telegraph economics editor Edmund Conway introduces and explains the central ideas of economics in a series of 50 clear and concise essays. Beginning with an exploration of the basic theories, such as Adam Smith's invisible hand', and concluding wi... read more

Question: what do Mount Kilimanjaro, a hundred-million-dollar marble mansion, a pair of handcuffs, a jar of walnut jam, the bleeding heart of a dead elk, an incontinent donkey, two Scottish terriers called Negus and Stasi, a fur-lined jockstrap, an attempted blow-job, and the fossilized bowel movement of a turtle have in common? Answer: they have all been offered as birthday presents to some rather famous people (respectively Kaiser Wilhelm I, Mrs William Vanderbilt, Diane Keaton, Josef Stalin, Jack Nicholson, Gerald Durrell, Eva B... read more

This brilliant new book from the author of Nickel and Dimed and Bait and Switch explores the tyranny of positive thinking, and offers a history of how it came to be the dominant mode in the USA. Ehrenreich conceived of the book when she became ill with breast cancer, and found herself surrounded by pink ribbons and bunny rabbits and platitudes. She balked at the way her anger and sadness about having the disease were seen as unhealthy and dangerous by health professionals and other sufferers. In her droll and incisive analysis of t... read more

In the Middle Ages it was believed that only a virgin could charm a unicorn out of hiding, but far from being a quaint, anachronistic concept, virginity remains a central value in western culture. Type 'virgin' into Google and you instantly get over 400,000 hits: everything from the Anti-Nicene Fathers to advertisements for 'Free Teen Virgin Pussy'. This book asks why virginity has remained so important in western civilization, and looks at the changing roles of virginity over the last 800 years, drawing on a wide range of examples... read more

Many books have been written on the Sixties: tributes to music and fashion, sex, drugs and revolution. In "The Sixties", Jenny Diski breaks the mould, wryly dismantling the big ideas that dominated the era - liberation, permissiveness and self-invention - to consider what she and her generation were really up to. Was it rude to refuse to have sex with someone? Did they take drugs to get by, or to see the world differently? How responsible were they for the self-interest and greed of the Eighties? With characteristic wit and verve, ... read more

Something went wrong around the start of the 21st century. Individual creativity began to go out of fashion. Music became an endless rehashing of the past. Scientists were in danger of no longer understanding their own research. Indeed, not only was individual creativity old-fashioned but so were individuals themselves. The crowd was wise. Machines, specifically computers, were no longer tools to be used by human minds - they were better than humans. Welcome to the world of the digital revolution. Yet what if, despite Web 2.0, desp... read more

Once upon a time, luxury was only available to the rarefied and aristocratic world of old money and royalty; luxury wasn't simply a product, it was a lifestyle. It denoted a history of tradition, superior quality and a pampered buying experience. Today's luxury marketplace would be virtually unrecognizable to the old-world elite. Gone are the family-owned businesses that were dedicated to integrity and quality; the industry is now run by massive corporations that focus only on growth, visibility, brand-awareness, advertising and ab... read more

Elegant, startling, and universal in its applications, The Black Swan is a concept that will change the way you look at the world. Black Swans underlie almost everything, from the rise of religions, to events in our own personal lives. A Black Swan is a highly improbable event with three principle characteristics: it is unpredictable; it carries a massive impact; and, after the fact, we concoct an explanation that makes it appear less random and more predictable than it was. The astonishing success of Google was a black swan; so wa... read more

Mad, bad and sad. From the depression suffered by Virginia Woolf and Sylvia Plath to the mental anguish and addictions of iconic beauties Zelda Fitzgerald and Marilyn Monroe. From Freud and Jung and the radical breakthroughs of psychoanalysis to Lacan's construction of a modern movement and the new women-centred therapies. This is the story of how we have understood mental disorders and extreme states of mind in women over the last two hundred years and how we conceive of them today, when more and more of our inner life and emotion... read more