Books in the Bloomsbury Revelations series

With Understanding Music and The Aesthetics of Music (1997) Roger Scruton set a new standard of rigour and seriousness in the philosophy of music. This collection of wide-ranging essays covers all aspects of the theory and practice of music, showing the significance of music as an expression of the moral life. The book is split into two parts, the first is devoted to the aesthetics and theory of music and the second consists of critical studies of individual composers, thinkers and works including essays on Mozart, Wagner, Beethoven's Ninth, Janácek & Schoenberg, Szymanowski and Adorno. Understanding Music will appeal to specialists in philosophy and musicology and also to music lovers who wish to find deeper meaning in this mysterious art. The Bloomsbury Revelations editions includes a new preface from author.

Offers a look at how the contemporary world is characterized by an extraordinary social complexity. This book takes the reader on a journey that starts with personal relations and climbs up one scale at a time to territorial states and beyond.

'Unquestionably the most authoritative, balanced, readable, and meticulously documented introduction to the Third Reich.' - International History Review Sir Ian Kershaw is regarded by many as the world's leading authority on Hitler and the Third Reich. Known for his clear and accessible style when dealing with complex historical issues his work has redefined the way we look at this period modern European history. The Nazi Dictatorship is Kershaw's landmark study of the Third Reich. It covers the major themes and debates relating to Nazism including the Holocaust, Hitler's authority and leadership, Nazi Foreign Policy and the aftermath, including issues surrounding Germany's unification. The Revelations edition includes a new preface from the author.

Creating A Role is the third book - alongside the international bestseller An Actor Prepares and Building A Character - in the series of influential translations that introduced Stanislavski's acting 'system' to the English-speaking world. Here Stanislavski describes the elaborate preparation that an actor must undergo before the actual performance itself. Now published in the Bloomsbury Revelations series to mark the 150th anniversary of Stanislavski's birth, the book includes the director's analysis of such works as Othello and Gogol's Inspector General.

Presenting an original global theory of culture, Girard explores the social function of violence and the mechanism of the social scapegoat. His vision is a challenge to conventional views of literature, anthropology, religion and psychoanalysis.

Paul Virilio is one of contemporary continental thought's most original and provocative critical voices. His vision of the impact of modern technology on the contemporary global condition is powerful and disturbing, ranging over art, architecture, science, politics, visual culture and warfare. In Art and Fear, Virilio traces the twin development of art and science over the 20th century. In his provocative vision, art and science vie with each other for the destruction of the human form as we know it. This is a radical take on the state of art for a post-human and post-historical world. In Art as Far as the Eye Can See Virilio considers the effects that the technological advances of the 20th century have had on art, aesthetics and politics and looks at the way in which these technologies alienate us from our physical environment.

Originally published: London: Cassell, 1956.

The 'Theatre of the Absurd' has become a familiar term to describe a group of radical European playwrights - writers such as Samuel Beckett, Eugène Ionesco, Jean Genet and Harold Pinter - whose dark, funny and humane dramas wrestled profoundly with the meaningless absurdity of the human condition. It is a testament to the power and insight of Martin Esslin's landmark work, originally published in 1961, that its title should enter the English language in the way that it has.Now available in the Bloomsbury Revelations series with a new preface by Marvin Carlson, The Theatre of the Absurd remains to this day a clear-eyed work of criticism on a compelling period of European writing.

This text on aesthetics includes major sections on: Art, Society, Aesthetics; the Categories of the Ugly, the Beautiful, the Technics; Natural Beauty; Coherence and Subject-Object; and Towards a Theory of the Artwork.

In The Shifting Point, his first book since The Empty Space, Brook assesses the lessons of his pioneering work from his brilliant debut at Stratford and the West End in the 1960s to the triumphant success of The Mahabharata.

A wholly revised, re-edited and expanded edition of one of the seminal texts of twentieth century theatre. Featuring new translations, additional texts, illustrations and editorial matter, this is a fullest and clearest account yet of Brecht's thinking on theatre and aesthetics.

Basing his discussion on everyday life in France, Lefebvre shows the degree to which our lived-in world and sense of it are shaped by decisions about which we know little and in which we do not participate.

Originally published: London: Thornton Butterworth Ltd., 1939.

A controversial examination by one of Britain's leading philosophers of one of the most important and morally complex issues of our time

The collaboration of the philosopher Gilles Deleuze and the psychoanalyst Felix Guattari has been one of the most profoundly influential partnerships in contemporary thought. Anti-Oedipus is the first part of their masterpiece, Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Ranging widely across the radical tradition of 20th-century thought and culture that preceeded them - from Foucault, Lacan and Jung to Samuel Beckett and Henry Miller - this revolutionary analysis of the intertwining of desire, reality and capitalist society is an essential read for anyone interested in postwar continental thought.

An Actor Prepares is the most famous acting training book ever to have been written and the work of Stanislavski has inspired generations of actors and trainers. This translation was the first to introduce Stanislavski's 'system' to the English speaking world and has stood the test of time in acting classes to this day. Stanislavski here deals with the inward preparation an actor must undergo in order to explore a role to the full. He introduces the concepts of the 'magic if' units and objectives, of emotion memory, of the super-objective and many more now famous rehearsal aids. Now available in the Bloomsbury Revelations series to mark the 150th anniversary of Stanislavski's birth, this is an essential read for actors, directors and anyone interested in the art of drama.

The Politics of Aesthetics rethinks the relationship between art and politics, reclaiming "aesthetics" from the narrow confines it is often reduced to. Jacques Rancière reveals its intrinsic link to politics by analysing what they both have in common: the delimitation of the visible and the invisible, the audible and the inaudible, the thinkable and the unthinkable, the possible and the impossible. Presented as a set of inter-linked interviews, The Politics of Aesthetics provides the most comprehensive introduction to Rancière's work to date, ranging across the history of art and politics from the Greek polis to the aesthetic revolution of the modern age. Available now in the Bloomsbury Revelations series 10 years after its original publication, The Politics of Aesthetics includes an afterword by Slavoj Zizek, an interview for the English edition, a glossary of technical terms and an extensive bibliography.

A landmark work of political and legal philosophy, Ronald Dworkin's Taking Rights Seriously was acclaimed as a major work on its first publication in 1977 and remains profoundly influential in the 21st century. A forceful statement of liberal principles - championing the legal, moral and political rights of the individual against the state - Dworkin demolishes prevailing utilitarian and legal-positivist approaches to jurisprudence. Developing his own theory of adjudication, he applies this to controversial public issues, from civil disobedience to positive discrimination. Elegantly written and cuttingly insightful, Taking Rights Seriously is one of the most important works of public thought of the last fifty years.

Highly controversial when it was first published in 1981, Alasdair MacIntyre's After Virtue has since established itself as a landmark work in contemporary moral philosophy. In this book, MacIntyre sought to address a crisis in moral language that he traced back to a European Enlightenment that had made the formulation of moral principles increasingly difficult. In the search for a way out of this impasse, MacIntyre returns to an earlier strand of ethical thinking, that of Aristotle, who emphasised the importance of 'virtue' to the ethical life. More than thirty years after its original publication, After Virtue remains a work that is impossible to ignore for anyone interested in our understanding of ethics and morality today.

Violence and the Sacred is René Girard's landmark study of human evil. Here Girard explores violence as it is represented and occurs throughout history, literature and myth. Girard's forceful and thought-provoking analyses of Biblical narrative, Greek tragedy and the lynchings and pogroms propagated by contemporary states illustrate his central argument that violence belongs to everyone and is at the heart of the sacred.