Ever since its publication in 1651, Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan has unsettled and challenged how we understand the world. Condemned and vilified by each new generation, Hobbes’ cold political vision continues to see through any number of political and ethical vanities.

In his wonderfully stimulating book The New Leviathans, John Gray allows us to understand the world of the 2020s with all its contradictions, moral horrors and disappointments through a new reading of Hobbes’ classic work. The collapse of the USSR ushered in an era of near-apoplectic triumphalism in the West: a genuine belief that a rational, liberal, well-managed future now awaited humankind and that tyranny, nationalism and unreason lay in the past. Since then, so many terrible events have occurred and so many poisonous ideas flourished, and yet still our liberal certainties treat them as aberrations which will somehow dissolve away. Hobbes would not be so confident.

Filled with fascinating and challenging perceptions, The New Leviathans is a powerful meditation on historical and current folly. As a species we always seem to be struggling to face the reality of base and delusive human instincts. Might a more self-aware, realistic and disabused ethics help us all?

Before the Greeks, the idea of the world was dominated by god-kings and their priests, in a life ruled by imagined metaphysical monsters. 2,500 years ago, in a succession of small eastern Mediterranean harbour-cities, that way of thinking began to change. Men (and some women) decided to cast off mental subservience and apply their own worrying and thinking minds to the conundrums of life.

These great innovators shaped the beginnings of philosophy. Through the questioning voyager Odysseus, Homer explored how we might navigate our way through the world. Heraclitus in Ephesus was the first to consider the interrelatedness of things. Xenophanes of Colophon was the first champion of civility. In Lesbos, the Aegean island of Sappho and Alcaeus, the early lyric poets asked themselves ‘How can I be true to myself?’ In Samos, Pythagoras imagined an everlasting soul and took his ideas to Italy where they flowered again in surprising and radical forms.

Prize-winning writer Adam Nicolson travels through this transforming world and asks what light these ancient thinkers can throw on our deepest preconceptions. Sparkling with maps, photographs and artwork, How to Be is a journey into the origins of Western thought.

Hugely formative ideas emerged in these harbour-cities: fluidity of mind, the search for coherence, a need for the just city, a recognition of the mutability of things, a belief in the reality of the ideal – all became the Greeks’ legacy to the world.

Born out of a rough, dynamic-and often cruel- moment in human history, it was the dawn of enquiry, where these fundamental questions about self, city and cosmos, asked for the first time, became, as they remain, the unlikely bedrock of understanding.

We are endlessly fascinated by  the  French. We are fascinated by their way of life, their creativity and sophistication, and even their insistence that they are exceptional. But how did France become  the  country it is today, and what really sets it apart?

Historian Peter Watson sets out to answer  these questions in this dazzling history of France, taking us from  the  seventeenth century to  the  present day through  the  nation’s most influential thinkers.  He opens  the  doors to  the  Renaissance salons that brought together poets, philosophers and scientists, and tells  the forgotten stories of  the extraordinary women who ran  these institutions, fostering a culture of stylish intellectualism unmatched anywhere else in  the  world. It’s a story that takes us into Bohemian cafés and cabarets, into chic Parisian high culture via French philosophies of food, fashion and sex, and through two explosive revolutions.

The French Mind  is a history propelled by  the writers, revolutionaries and painters who loved, inspired and rivalled one another over four hundred years. It documents  the  shaping of a nation  whose global influence, in art, culture and politics, cannot be overstated.
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‘An encyclopaedic celebration of French intellectuals refusing to give up on universal principles, while remaining slim, bringing up well-behaved children and falling in love at every opportunity’ The Times

‘An engaging movement through time towards France’s recent reckonings with extremism, exceptionalism and empire’  TLS

We are endlessly fascinated by  the  French. We are fascinated by their way of life, their creativity, sophistication and self-assurance, and even their insistence that they are exceptional. But how did France become  the  country it is today, and what really sets it apart?

Journalist and historian Peter Watson sets out to answer  these questions in  The  French  Mind,  a dazzling history of France that takes us from  the  seventeenth century to  the  present day through  the  nation’s most influential thinkers.  He opens  the  doors to  the  Renaissance salons that were a breeding ground for poets, philosophers and scientists, and tells  the forgotten stories of  the extraordinary  succession of women who ran  these institutions, fostering a culture of stylish intellectualism unmatched anywhere else in  the  world.

It’s a story that takes us into Bohemian cafes and cabarets, into chic Parisian high culture via French philosophies of food, fashion and sex, while growing unrest hastens the bloody birth of a republic. From  the  1789  revolution to  the country’s occupation by Nazi Germany, Watson argues that a unique series of devastating military defeats helped shape the resilient, proud, innovative character of the French.

This  is a history of breathtaking ambition, propelled by  the  characters Watson brings to vivid life:  the  writers, revolutionaries and painters who loved, inspired and rivalled one another over four hundred years. It documents  the  shaping of a nation  whose global influence, in art, culture and politics, cannot be overstated.
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‘An encyclopaedic celebration of French intellectuals refusing to give up on universal principles, rooted in the Enlightenment and French Revolution, while remaining slim, bringing up well-behaved children and falling in love at every opportunity’ The Times

‘An engaging movement through time towards France’s recent reckonings with extremism, exceptionalism and empire’ TLS