SS Commander Reinhard Höhn was one of Nazi Germany’s most brilliant legal minds, an archetype of the fervid technocrats that built the Third Reich. Gone into hiding after 1945, he survived unscathed and re-emerged in the 1950s as the founder of a management school.

His story wouldn’t be too different from that of other prominent Nazis, if not for the fact that the great majority of Germany’s post-war business leaders were educated at his school. Is this a coincidence? Or is there a link between the forms of organization of Nazism and the principles of corporate management?

At the core of Höhn’s vision was the concept of freedom, as freedom to obey orders from above-to carry out one’s mission no matter the cost.

“A work buzzing with appetite and curiosity.”-Andrew Marr, author and broadcaster

“Living and Dying with Marcel Proust is a feast.”-Lydia Davis, winner of the Man Booker International Prize

One of the masterpieces of twentieth-century fiction, A la recherche du temps perdu belongs in the tradition of the Initiation Story, the journey it describes combining elements drawn from the earlier narratives of great expectations and lost illusions, while recasting them in ways that are distinctively Proust’s.

On the year that marks the centenary of Marcel Proust’s death, the eminent literary scholar, Christopher Prendergast, traces that journey as it unfolds on an arc defined by the polarity of his title, living and dying. His book offers a chapter by chapter exploration of the rich sensory and impressionistic tapestry of a lived world, woven by the pulse of desire, the hauntings of memory and an ever alert responsiveness to tastes, perfumes, sounds, and colours. It also traces the construction of a unique architecture of narrative time and a corresponding mode of story-telling, marked by all manner of loops, swerves, detours, regressions and returns, from the macro level of the novel’s plot to the micro level of the famously elaborate Proustian sentence. The lives of his characters, both major and minor, are shown as criss-crossing and converging in ways that often take the reader by surprise, before descending the arc on an irreversible trajectory of decline, as the body starts to fail and the grave beckons.  

Did Marco Polo bring pasta back from China, or is that a myth?
How did the Neapolitan “macharoni” turn into the ubiquitous spaghetti?
Is it even an Italian dish?  

Hundreds of shapes and thousands of recipes give expression to the culture and products of the country’s regions. But spaghetti with tomato sauce remains Italy’s identity dish par excellence.  

Massimo Montanari goes in search of the dish’s true origins, tracing its history along the multiple, intricate routes taken by its raw ingredients to merge and become a distinctive element of culinary tradition.

It took almost two thousand years and input from the Far East, the Arabic world, and the Americas, for the dish to take centre stage. Its development is the result of chance encounters, unplanned exchanges, and unpredictable intersections.  As we dig in search of spaghetti’s origins, we find its strands wrap right around the world.

“Learned and entertaining.”-Il Giornale

Favourite disciple, influential woman, true believer and follower of Jesus: how do we see Mary Magdalene today? Witness to Jesus’ crucifixion and his burial, the first to announce the resurrection, she is without a doubt the most recognizable of the gospels’ female figures, a central character in Christianity’s foundational story. But centuries of alteration and resizing, of merging several female figures into one, have erased Mary Madgalene’s apostolic role and left us with a misrepresentation. They delivered the figure of a quintessential repentant sinner, one in whom sensual beauty and mortification of the body are combined.  

When we reflect on the “Magdalene case”, delving into the folds of history and the arts, and removing misunderstandings and manipulations, we rediscover the crucial roles women have always held within the heart of Christianity, despite their stories often going untold. Adriana Valerio’s engrossing retelling of Magdalene’s story, founded as it is in historical fact, is an unmissable opportunity to reclaim such roles in a church that remains largely patriarchal to the present day.

World-famous architect Renzo Piano and his son Carlo set sail from Genoa one late Summer day, guided by the ancestral desire felt by many explorers before them: to find Atlantis (in Italian, Atlantide). Atlantis is the perfect city, built to harbour a perfect society. This is its true beauty, precious and elusive.
Renzo Piano, a man who can not only measure land at a glance but also the sea’s infinite geometry, returns to the places where he has erected his works, mosaic pieces in the infinite, necessary quest for perfection. With his son he sails across the Pacific, along the banks of the Thames and the Seine, reaching as far as Athens, San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park and Osaka Bay.
In search of beauty, he finds the imperfections that every building project carries within it. And so, all that remains is to sail on.

In The Night in Gethsemane, Massimo Recalcati, one of Italy’s highest regarded psychoanalysts, traces the relationship between biblical text and psychoanalytical theory, revealing human life in all its fragility and its agony.