Yale University Press

The Western world has experienced extraordinary economic progress throughout the last six decades, a prosperous period so extended that continuous economic growth has come to seem normal. But such an era of continuously rising living standards is an historical anomaly, economist Stephen D. King warns, and the current stagnation of Western economies...

More than most artists, Henri Matisse conducted an ongoing dialogue with his earlier works, continually questioning himself and his methods in order to, as he put it, "push further and deeper into true painting". In a fresh approach to this giant of 20th-century art, "Matisse: In Search of True Painting" examines sixty works and more than five...

In his Autobiography, Gandhi wrote, "What I want to achieve - what I have been striving and pining to achieve these thirty years - is self-realization, to see God face to face...All that I do by way of speaking and writing, and all my ventures in the political field, are directed to this same end". While hundreds of biographies and histories have...

The American Country House is a delightful romp through the beautiful, the exotic, the absurd, and the charming, all as exemplified in the eclecticism of ''New World'' fancy and money. -- Art Times...

This long-awaited biography, twenty years after the last major account, uncovers Dickens the man through the profession in which he excelled. Drawing on a lifetime's study of this prodigiously brilliant figure, Michael Slater explores the personal and emotional life, the high-profile public activities, the relentless travel, the charitable works,...

Just before the outbreak of World War II, young Witold Gombrowicz left his home in Poland and set sail for South America. In 1953, still living as an expatriate in Argentina, he began his "Diary" with one of literature's most memorable openings: Monday - Me; Tuesday - Me; Wednesday - Me; and, Thursday - Me. Gombrowicz's "Diary" grew to become a...