The Floral Patterns of India Wilson Henry Thames&Hudson

A stimulating resource that guides readers through the most significant symbols from art history, spanning many civilizations and centuries while revealing the common heritage of a global visual language • The Hidden Language of Symbols covers a wide-ranging selection of visual culture and art under one unified theme: symbols. Often not immediately apparent, our day-to-day lives abound with symbols of various kinds, from national emblems to emojis, allegories to logos, all of which have a fascinating story • Organized across four all-encompassing themes-power, faith, hope, and uncertainty-this stimulating illustrated account of forty-eight key symbols from global art history is aimed at museum-goers, armchair art sleuths, or anyone who wants to understand the history of their visual environment from an unusual and creative angle

Alfredo Di Stefano, Diego Maradona, Gabriel Batistua, Juan Roman Riquelme, Lionel Messi... Argentina has produced some of the greatest footballers of all time. But the rich, volatile history of Argentinian football is made up of both the sublime and the ruthlessly pragmatic. Jonathan Wilson, having lived in Buenos Aires, is ideally placed to chart the sport's development in a country that, perhaps more than any other, lives and breathes football, its theories and its myths • Fully revised and updated, this new edition looks at the contrasting evolution of Argentinian football over the last ten years; from the chaos and violence of the abandoned 2018 Copa Libertadores final between River Plate and Boca Juniors to the revitalised national side under manager Lionel Scaloni, which triumphed at the 2019 Copa America and the 2022 World Cup

The first-ever translation of the ancient Egyptian Book of the Dead of Sobekmose-fully illustrated and explained by a leading Egyptologist, offering fascinating insights into one of the greatest civilizations of the ancient world • The Book of the Dead of Sobekmose, in the collection of the Brooklyn Museum, is one of the most important surviving examples of ancient Egyptian Books of the Dead. Such "books"-actually papyrus scrolls-were composed of traditional funerary texts, including magic spells, which were thought to assist the deceased on their journeys into the afterlife. The ancient Egyptians believed in an underworld fraught with dangers that needed to be carefully navigated, from the familiar, such as snakes and scorpions, to the extraordinary: lakes of fire to cross, animal-headed demons to pass, and the ritual Weighing of the Heart, whose outcome determined whether or not the deceased would be born again into the afterlife for eternity

The Russian Empire was among the most mysterious of the world's great powers, profoundly torn between a rural population living almost medieval lives and industrial and social change in the cities. The tsar's gigantic realm struggled with the advent of modernity and with its own internal contradictions between Asia and Europe, faith and science, different ethnic groups, and the divergent interests of the aristocracy, the middle classes, the urban workers, and the rural poor: a continent of contradictions from abject poverty to fairy-tale wealth captured by authors from Tolstoy to Chekhov, from Gogol to Gorky. Twilight of the Romanovs opens a door into the world of pre-revolutionary Russia using original photographs taken during the last decades of Romanov rule

The art and architecture of Egypt during the age of the pharaohs capture the imagination of the modern world. Vivid, graceful forms decorating monuments that emanated ambition and authority spark our wonder about this distant culture. Ever youthful and elegant men and women encounter odd, animal-headed gods and monsters amid scenes of work and leisure, in a paradise of plain, bright colours, where hieroglyphic texts hint at grand ideas • The tombs and temples of ancient Egypt reveal how art and monumental building first flowered at the heart of civilization. Among the great creative achievements of ancient Egypt we discover a set of constant forms: archetypes in art and architecture that state clearly and concisely the contemporary view of authority, divinity, beauty and meaning

The extraordinary life story of Song Huai-Kuei, better known as Madame Song, follows the arc of 20th-century history. Artist, entrepreneur and impresario, Song broke cultural barriers for love, transcended Cold War borders for her art, and laid the foundations for a global fashion industry. With her cosmopolitan outlook, she defined an influential vision for Chinese culture on the world stage and asserted an Asian perspective in 21st-century art and design. Madame Song is a name that everyone interested in the roots of contemporary visual culture needs to know • At the heart of this volume is a critical biography that explores Song's youth in revolutionary China, her cross-cultural marriage to Bulgarian fibre artist Maryn Varbanov, her success within avant-garde circles in Eastern and Western Europe during the Cold War, and finally her efforts within China to revive traditional aesthetics in tandem with the explosive rise of global couture

The completely updated edition of J. M. Roberts and Odd Arne Westad's widely acclaimed, landmark bestseller The Penguin History of the World • For generations of readers The Penguin History of the World has been one of the great cultural experiences - the entire story of human endeavour laid out in all its grandeur and folly, drama and pain in a single authoritative book. Now, for the first time, it has been completely overhauled for its 6th edition - not just bringing it up to date, but revising it throughout in the light of new research and discoveries, such as the revolution in our understanding of many civilizations in the Ancient World. The closing sections of the book reflect what now seems to be the inexorable rise of Asia and the increasingly troubled situation in the West

The Penguin Book of Card Games is the authoritative up-to-date compendium, describing an abundance of games to be played both for fun and by serious players • Auctions, trumpless hands, cross-ruffing and lurching: card players have a language all of their own. From games of high skill (Bridge) to games of high chance (Newmarket) to trick-taking (Whist) and banking (Pontoon), David Parlett, seasoned specialist in card games, takes us masterfully through the countless games to choose from • Not content to merely show us games with the conventional fifty-two card pack, Parlett covers many games played with other types of cards - are you brave enough to play with Tarot? With a 'working description' of each game, with the rules, variations and origins of each, as well as an appendix of games invented by the author himself, The Penguin Book of Card Games will delight, entertain and inform both the novice and the seasoned player

The Romanticism that emerged after the American and French revolutions of 1776 and 1789 represented a new flowering of the imagination and the spirit, and a celebration of the soul of humanity with its capacity for love. This extraordinary collection sets the acknowledged genius of poems such as Blake's 'Tyger', Coleridge's 'Khubla Khan' and Shelley's 'Ozymandias' alongside verse from less familiar figures and women poets such as Charlotte Smith and Mary Robinson. We also see familiar poets in an unaccustomed light, as Blake, Wordsworth and Shelley demonstrate their comic skills, while Coleridge, Keats and Clare explore the Gothic and surreal

"The Ladybird Book of London" is a gem from the Ladybird vintage archive. First published in 1961, this is a classic Ladybird hardback book, packed with information about Britain's capital. This new edition is exactly the same as the original, with a dust jacket and beautifully reproduced images. The story of London, her sights and history, is illustrated with twenty-four beautiful full-page pictures. Starting from Trafalgar Square this book takes you through famous streets to see historic buildings, to learn something of the story of Britain's famous capital. Westminster Abbey and St Paul's Cathedral, the Tower, Guildhall and the City, Hampton Court and Kew Gardens, the Zoo and Madame Tussaud's - they are all here

'The Boy-scouts mistook my signal, and have killed the postman. I've had very little practice in this sort of thing, you see' • The British short story tradition is probably the richest, most varied and historically extensive in the world. This new anthology celebrates the full diversity and energy of its writers, subjects and tones, from the story's origins with Defoe, Swift and Fielding, to the 'golden age' of the fin de siecle and Edwardian period, ending with the First World War. Including the most famous authors as well as some magnificent, little-known stories never republished since their first appearance in magazines and periodicals, these stories are by turns topical and playful, ghostly and theatrical, rumbustious and sublime • Edited with an introduction by Philip Hensher

The Penguin Dictionary of Economics explains a host of economic terms, from acceleration principle to venture capital, Euro to X-efficiency, globalisation to zero-sum game. The eighth edition has been fully revised and updated to include those terms that have become so familiar since the global recession begun ('quantitative easing' and 'sub-prime' among them), but whose meanings escape most of us. Wide-ranging and accessible, this detailed practical and international guide will be indispensable for students of economics and professionals (in business, finance or the public sector), and for anyone wishing to follow economic discussions in the media today