A fascinating and counterintuitive portrait of the sordid, hidden world behind the dazzling artwork of Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, Botticelli, and more

Renowned as a period of cultural rebirth and artistic innovation, the Renaissance is cloaked in a unique aura of beauty and brilliance. Its very name conjures up awe-inspiring images of an age of lofty ideals in which life imitated the fantastic artworks for which it has become famous. But behind the vast explosion of new art and culture lurked a seamy, vicious world of power politics, perversity, and corruption that has more in common with the present day than anyone dares to admit.

The Creator invented the game. The stakes were nothing less than the immortal fate of mankind. Yet when fallen angel Jim Heron was challenged to play, he had no idea the voracious demon Devina would be so formidable an adversary-or that the carnal depths to which he was willing to go could prove so fatal.

Selfies, blogs and lifelogging devices have become important ways in which we understand ourselves. Jill Walker Rettberg analyses these and related genres as three intertwined modes of self-representation: visual, written and quantitative.
Rettberg explores topics like the meaning of Instagram filters, smartphone apps that write your diary for you, and the ways in which governments and commercial entities create their own representations of us from the digital traces we leave behind as we go through our lives.

Wang Gungwu's study of the relationship between China and the Chinese with imperial Britain examines the possibilities, as well as the limits of their encounters. Beyond the clichés of opium, fighting, and the diplomatic skills needed to fend off rivals and enemies, Gungwu probes areas of more intimate encounters, not least of which is the beginning of a broader English-speaking future between the two countries.

Many philosophers think that if you're morally responsible for a state of affairs, you must be a cause of it. Ingmar Persson argues that this strand of common sense morality is asymmetrical, in that it features the act-omission doctrine, according to which there are stronger reasons against performing some harmful actions than in favour of performing any beneficial actions. He analyses the act-omission doctrine as consisting in a theory of negative rights, according to which there are rights not to have one's life, body, and property interfered with, and a conception of responsibility as being based on causality.