Books published by Cambridge University Press

A major new account of appeasement and the question of whether the Second World War could have been prevented. G. C. Peden provides a comparative analysis of Chamberlain and Churchill's view on foreign policy, how best to deter Germany and explores what deterrence and appeasement meant in the context of the 1930s.

Telling the history of Tehran from the nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century, Ashkan Rezvani Naraghi demonstrates how the city was transformed by developing discourses around spatial knowledge. Using an array of archival sources, Rezvani Naraghi stresses the agency of everyday inhabitants in the process of urban change.

In Egypt during the first centuries CE, men and women would meet discreetly in their homes, in temple sanctuaries, or insolitary places to learn a powerful practice of spiritual liberation. They thought of themselves as followers of Hermes Trismegistus, the legendary master of ancient wisdom. While many of their writings are lost, those that survived have been interpreted primarily as philosophical treatises about theological topics. Wouter J. Hanegraaff challenges this dominant narrative by demonstrating that Hermetic literature was concerned with experiential practices intended for healing the soul from mental delusion. The Way of Hermes involved radical alterations of consciousness in which practitioners claimed to perceive the true nature of reality behind the hallucinatory veil of appearances. Hanegraaff explores how practitioners went through a training regime that involved luminous visions, exorcism, spiritual rebirth, cosmic consciousness, and union with the divine beauty of universal goodness and truth to attain the salvational knowledge known as gnosis.

World-renowned experts explain the most important developments in philosophical thought and practice from 1945 to 2015, covering the analytic, comparative, and Continental schools and exploring major and rising topics of interest. This accessible and authoritative guide to contemporary philosophy will interest students and scholars of all levels.

The first stand-alone English translation of the Persian Wars, a work that not only describes the wars between Byzantium and Sasanian Persia, but also provides a detailed account of the Nika riot that nearly unseated Justinian and the first outbreak of bubonic plague in Constantinople.

The first comprehensive 'how to' guide to the formal analysis of sociolinguistic variation (how language varies in social context). Practical and informal, it shows in a step-by-step fashion how the analysis is carried out, leading the reader through every stage of a sociolinguistic research project. Contains checklists, tips, and exercises.