Theodor Adorno is the foremost thinker of the Frankfurt School, the extraordinarily influential group of German thinkers that fled to the US in the 1930s. This book is his classic discussion of the sublime, the ugly and the beautiful 'Art is the sedimentation of human misery'.

This text contains two of Walter Benjamin's essays, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction , and Theses on the Philosophy of History , as well as others on the art of translation, Kafka, storytelling, Baudelaire, Brecht's epic theatre, Proust, and book collecting.

The experience of modernisation - the social changes that swept millions of people into the capitalist world - and modernism in art, literature and architecture are integrated in this account.

An influential publication of the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory. Various analyses in the book concern such phenomena as the detachment of science from practical life, the manipulative nature of entertainment culture, and a paranoid behavioural structure that marks the limits of enlightenment.

A classic of twentieth century thought, this work is Adorno's literary and philosophical masterpiece.