Presents a guide to Shakespeare's "Othello", including text and audio from various productions and preformances that provide a context for the play and it characters.

A study of God as he appears in the Old Testament of the Bible, showing him as a combination of several personalities in one character, torn by conflicting urges, but eternally compelling.

A 1996 modern-day English translation of the Dead Sea Scrolls, containing virtually every legible portion of the fragmented scrolls, and including never-before released texts and recently discovered writings by and about key biblical prophets and ancestors.

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 true roots of these influences, however, and how do our interpretations...

King translates, interprets, and provides historical context for the fifth-century Coptic manuscript of this gospel, whose central voice is Mary Magdalene. The author demonstrates that this gospel, composed around the early part of the second century and similar to other noncanonical gnostic or heretical writings, exemplifies the diversity of Christian understandings of Jesus' mission before the establishment of a male-dominated orthodox position...

One of the greatest plays of all time, the compelling tragedy of the tormented young prince of Denmark continues to capture the imaginations of modern audiences worldwide. Confronted with evidence that his uncle murdered his father, and with his mother's infidelity, Hamlet must find a means of reconciling his longing for oblivion with his duty as avenger. The ghost, Hamlet's feigned madness, Ophelia's death and burial, the play within a play, the...

Discusses the concepts of original sin and the historical meaning of Christianity.

Bloom draws on his experience as critic, teacher, and prolific reader to plumb the great books for their sustaining wisdom. Shedding all polemic, Bloom addresses the solitary reader, who, he urges, should read for the purest of all reasons: to discover and augment the self. Always dazzling in his ability to draw connections between texts across continents and centuries, Bloom instructs readers in how to immerse themselves in the different literary...

Claude Monet is perhaps the world's most beloved artist, and among all his creations, the paintings of the water lilies in his garden at Giverny are most famous. Seeing them in museums around the world, viewers are transported by the power of Monet's brush into a peaceful world of harmonious nature. Monet himself intended them to provide "an asylum of peaceful meditation." Yet, as Ross King reveals in his magisterial chronicle of both artist and masterpiece,...

One night on the heath, the brave and respected general Macbeth encounters three witches who foretell that he will become king of Scotland. At first skeptical, he’s urged on by the ruthless, single-minded ambitions of Lady Macbeth, who suffers none of her husband’s doubt. But seeing the prophecy through to the bloody end leads them both spiralling into paranoia, tyranny, madness, and murder. This shocking tragedy - a violent caution to those...