Today we celebrate the 100th anniversary of the Radboud University. This university’s anniversary would not be complete without an honorary doctor in the language sciences. We feel privileged that you agreed to become an honorar y doctor of Radboud University.You have contributed so much to the language sciences. At the start of your career, you…
No one has given the polymath Thomas Young (1773–1829) the all-round examination he so richly deserves—until now. Celebrated biographer Andrew Robinson portrays a man who solved mystery after mystery in the face of ridicule and rejection, and never sought fame. As a physicist, Young challenged the theories of Isaac Newton and proved that light is a wave. As a physician, he showed how the ey…
This book critically examines assumptions about age, women, and gender. Amidst all the attention that has been granted to difference and inequality, however uneven and unsatisfactory in terms of class and caste, race and ethnicity, sexuality and gender, disability, religion, and nation, questions of age and its importance for feminism have been less well defined. Drawing on recent literature on…
Islamic peoples account for one fifth of the world's population and yet there is widespread misunderstanding in the West of what Islam really is. Francis Robinson and his team set out to address this, revealing the complex and sometimes contrary nature of Muslim culture. As well as taking on the issues uppermost in everyone's minds, such as the role of religious and political fundamentalism, th…
Is it culture, the weather, geography? Perhaps ignorance of what the right policies are? Simply, no. None of these factors is either definitive or destiny. Otherwise, how to explain why Botswana has become one of the fastest growing countries in the world, while other African nations, such as Zimbabwe, the Congo, and Sierra Leone, are mired in poverty and violence? Daron Acemoglu and Jame…
What is a family? The essays gathered here explore disparate family histories in early modern Japan, attending variously to the samurai elite, agrarian villagers, urban merchants, communities of outcastes, and the circles surrounding priests, artists, and scholars. They draw on diverse sources—from population registers and legal documents to personal letters and diaries, from genealogies and …
Healthy ageing is the ideal trajectory from birth to death. As we reach older age, physical changes are inevitable, but it is not simply the effect of these changes that makes ageing healthy or unhealthy. An older person may have many years of inca-pacity as they decline slowly towards death. Or they may be well and functioning happily until a very rapid shift into loss of life (the ideal of dy…
This book has been written to help you to do well in your Cambridge International Examinations IGCSE Biology examination. We hope that you enjoy using it. The book can also be used with the Cambridge O level Biology syllabus. There are quite a lot of definitions in the IGCSE syllabus that you need to learn by heart. These are all in this book, at appropriate points in each chapter, inside boxes…
This Very Short Introduction to Classics links a haunting temple on a lonely mountainside to the glory of ancient Greece and the grandeur of Rome, and to Classics within modern culture-from Jefferson and Byron to Asterix and Ben-Hur. We are all Classicists - we come into touch with the Classics daily: in our culture, politics, medicine, architecture, language, and literature. What are the tr…
What is depression? What is bipolar disorder? How are they diagnosed and how are they treated? Can a small child be diagnosed with depression and treated with antidepressants - and should they be? Covering depression, manic depression, and bipolar disorder, this Very Short Introduction gives a brief account of the history of these concepts, before focussing on the descriptions and understand…