As much a portrait of his time as a biography of the man, Karl Marx: Greatness and Illusion returns the author of Das Kapital to his nineteenth-century world, before twentieth-century inventions transformed him into Communism's patriarch and fierce lawgiver. Gareth Stedman Jones depicts an era dominated by extraordinary challenges and new notions about God, human capacities, empires, and political systems--and, above all, the shape of the future....
"The nineteenth century in Europe was the first age of cultural globalization-an epoch when mass communications and high-speed rail travel brought Europe together, overcoming national barriers and creating a truly pan-European canon of artistic, musical, and literary works. By 1900, people across the continent were reading the same books, looking at the same art, and attending the same opera performances. Acclaimed historian Orlando Figes moves from...
Judith Flanders leads us through the markets, transport systems, sewers, rivers, slums, alleys, cemeteries, gin palaces, chop-houses and entertainment emporia of Dickens' London, to reveal the Victorian capital in all its variety, vibrancy, and squalor. From the colorful cries of street-sellers to the uncomfortable reality of travel by omnibus, to the many uses for the body parts of dead horses or the unimaginably grueling working days of hawker children,...