The author of The Name of the Rose considers a wide range of topics, from Superman and Casablanca , Federico Fellini and Michelangelo Antonioni, Jim Jones and mass suicide, and Woody Allen, to pop festivals and football, and not least the social and personal implications of tight jeans.

Explores the links between Hollywood and the fast food trade, and the tactics used to target ever younger consumers. This title is a meticulously researched account.

Defines our understanding of colonialism and empire.

A series of essays in which Barthes seeks to tear away masks and demystify the signs, signals, gestures and messages through which western society sustains, sells, identifies and yet obscures itself.

From Jane Austen to Salman Rushdie, from Yeats to media coverage of the Gulf War, this title provides an account of the roots of imperialism in European culture.

The book that offers a cure for affluenza, 'No Logo' is one of those rare books that defines a generation, the most significant one since Douglas Coupland's 'Generation X'.

This work offers a unified field theory of Western culture, high and low, since the Egyptians invented beauty. From Emily Dickinson and Medusa to Madonna, it makes a persuasive case for all art as a pagan battleground between male and female, form and chaos, civilization and demonic nature.

A larger format second edition of this work of social and cultural criticism concerning the narcissism and self-interest of the Me Decade , which has a new Afterword in which the author comments on the 80s and New Age spirituality.

Beginning with the Greeks, and through a series of historical examples, this text demonstrates that leisure has always been the foundation for any culture. It argues that unless the contemporary clamour for entertainment and distraction is challenged, culture will be destroyed.

Includes the author's views on overpopulation, propaganda, advertising and government control. This book appeals for the defence of relevant individualism.

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.

An account of the war against women, the insidiously manipulated political and cultural backlash against the hard-won equality and independence which women achieved in the 1970s and 1980s. Using examples from all areas of public life, Faludi presents a picture of the erosion of women's status.

Subtitled 'The Fraying of America', this book dismantles and inspects the core elements of the contemporary American ethos. From the author of 'The Fatal Shore' and 'American Visions'.

Millions of Americans work full-time, year-round, for poverty level wages. Journalist Barbara Ehrenreich decided to join them in order to find out how anyone survives on six dollars an hour. So began a gruelling, hair-raising and darkly funny odyssey though the underworld of working America.

In this book the author gives an account of the arguments surrounding the proposition of postmodernism and contributes to the debate on what exactly is the nature of current social change.

Based on a lecture given at Girton College Cambridge.

Photographs are everywhere. They have the power to shock, idealize or seduce, they create a sense of nostalgia and act as a memorial, and they can be used as evidence against us or to identify us. This title examines the ways in which we use these omnipresent images to manufacture a sense of reality and authority in our lives.

Freud's epoch-making insights revolutionized our perception of the self, forming the foundation for psychoanalysis; here he presents his theory of an innate 'death drive' - arguing that civilisation distorts natural aggression to impose a terrible burden of guilt upon us.

Combining historical analysis with far-reaching contemporary observation, Susan Jacoby dissects a modern America at odds with its heritage of Enlightenment reason and with 21st century knowledge and science. With mordant wit, the author offers an unsparing indictment of the ways in which 'dumbness' and 'junk thought' have permeated throughout American society - both on the political right and the