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Reading lists

The ultimate Eurovision-inspired reading list

On the Shoulders of Giants

The final collection of essays from the internationally acclaimed and bestselling author of The Name of the Rose and The Prague Cemetery, on the subjects of art and culture.

Unlike many academics, he [Eco] had the ability to write in an accessible and engaging style… This book consists of 12 essays… Reading them is exhilarating… Almost every page of this entrancing book invites questions and provokes reflections

On the Shoulders of Giants…captures Eco on some of his most generous and scintillating form as a lecturer, breezing along with a lifetime’s material at his fingertips

There are people you’ve never met and yet you miss them when they are gone… Eco’s famously ironic voice is penetrating … The issues Eco addresses are so enormous in their scale they seem insurmountable, yet his measured, erudite commentary assures you that they can be understood and therefore resolved

He brilliantly exposes all that is absurd and paradoxical in contemporary behaviour. Eco’s irony is disarming, his cleverness dazzling

Umberto Eco (Author) 
Umberto Eco (1932–2016) wrote fiction, literary criticism and philosophy. His first novel, The Name of the Rose, was a major international bestseller. His other works include Foucault's Pendulum, The Island of the Day Before, Baudolino, The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana, The Prague Cemetery and Numero Zero along with many brilliant collections of essays.

The final collection from the internationally acclaimed and bestselling author of The Name of the Rose and The Prague Cemetery, on the subjects of art and culture. 
 
In this collection of essays we find Umberto Eco’s perennial areas of interest explored in a lively and engaging style, accompanied by beautiful reproductions of the art he discusses. In these wide-ranging pieces he explores the roots of our civilization, changing ideas of beauty, our obsession with conspiracies and the emblematic heroes of the great narrative, amongst other fascinating topics. 
 
Umberto Eco was one of the most influential, and entertaining, intellectuals of the last century, as well as being a critically acclaimed and bestselling writer of both fiction and non-fiction.

Chronicles of a Liquid Society

The final book from one of Europe's cultural giants: an entertaining collection of essays about the modern world - from unbridled individualism to mobile phones

Discover the final book from one of Europe's cultural giants. 
 
In this entertaining collection of essays about the modern world the celebrated author of The Name of the Rose explores everything from unbridled individualism to mobile phones. 
 
'He brilliantly exposes all that is absurd and paradoxical in contemporary behaviour. Eco's irony is disarming, his cleverness dazzling' Guardian 
 
'Eco has left us an intelligent, intriguing, and often hilariously incisive set of observations on contemporary follies and changing mores' Publisher's Weekly

A swan song from one of Europe's great intellectuals...Eco entertains with his intellect, humor, and insatiable curiosity...there's much here to enjoy and ponder

Eco has left us an intelligent, intriguing, and often hilariously incisive set of observations on contemporary follies and changing mores.

Umberto Eco (1932–2016) wrote fiction, literary criticism and philosophy. His first novel, The Name of the Rose, was a major international bestseller. His other works include Foucault's Pendulum, The Island of the Day Before, Baudolino, The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana, The Prague Cemetery and Numero Zero along with many brilliant collections of essays.

Umberto Eco was an international cultural superstar. A celebrated essayist as well as novelist, in this, his last collection, he explores many aspects of the modern world with irrepressible curiosity and wisdom written in his uniquely ironic voice. 
 
Written by Eco as articles for his regular column in l’Espresso magazine, he brings his dazzling erudition, incisiveness and keen sense of the everyday to bear on topics such as popular culture and politics, unbridled individualism, conspiracies, the old and the young, mobile phones, mass media, racism, good manners and the crisis in ideological values. It is a final gift to his readers – astute, witty and illuminating.

Numero Zero

The gripping new conspiracy thriller by the internationally bestselling author of The Name of the Rose

Combines farce and conspiracy thriller while retaining the author’s familiar sense of detachment

Cynical but heartfelt, utterly flippant yet deadly serious

A conte philosophique on our tendency to see conspiracies everywhere… in the end, a damning confirmation of the long moral and civic decline of Italy over the past fifty years

Eco’s novel on post-War Italy inevitably turns into a detective story. But it's one without a culprit: like all the great detective stories of [Italy’s] recent history...[which] Eco revisits at high speed in this fast-paced, frequently entertaining novel

A kaleidoscopic, playful, yet deadly serious satire

The gripping new conspiracy thriller by the bestselling author of The Name of the Rose 
 
1945, Lake Como. Mussolini and his mistress are captured and shot by local partisans. The precise circumstances of Il Duce’s death remain shrouded in confusion and controversy. 
 
1992, Milan. Colonna takes a job at a fledgling newspaper financed by a powerful media magnate. There he learns the paranoid theories of Braggadocio, who is convinced that Mussolini’s corpse was a body-double and part of a wider Fascist plot. 
 
Colonna is sceptical. But when a body is found, stabbed to death in a back alley, and the paper is shut down, even he is jolted out of his complacency. 
 
Fuelled by conspiracy theories, Mafiosi, love, corruption and murder, Numero Zero reverberates with the clash of forces that have shaped Italy since the Second World War. This gripping novel from the author of The Name of the Rose is told with all the power of a master storyteller.

Inventing the Enemy

The final collection of essays from the internationally acclaimed and bestselling author of The Name of the Rose and The Prague Cemetery, on the subjects of art and culture.

Whether discussing the relationship between our knowledge and God, abortion, stem cells, embryos, the right to life, or reviews of James Joyce’s Ulysses by fascist journalists of the 1920s and 1930s, this collection gleams with clarity, depth and wisdom

For the sheer depth and clarity of his learning and wisdom, Eco has no living rival

[A] philosophical football match that encompasses myth, literature and history... Discursive, grandiose, witty stuff from the quintessential savvy professor

Eco's greatest virtue might be said to lie in his ability to clarify the exact nature of our present perplexities...lucid, logical and always firmly on the side of civilisation

Eco's writing has a unique ability to dance on the page and to resonate in the mind

Thought provoking… nuanced, accessible prose… the collection amply shows off Eco’s sophisticated, agile mind and will undoubtedly bring pleasure to readers familiar with his worlds while enriching those willing to learn about them

There is plenty here for everyone, and some of it is up-to-the-minute. The subtitle may be a semi-provocative exaggeration, but this collection of occasional pieces does cover a lot of ground

All of [Eco’s essays] pay tribute to history, giving his work their characteristically accessible weight and depth, often conveying some new nugget of information

[Eco’s] mind is still as fecund as ever, as demonstrated by this collection of essays… Eco may be an intellectual of the highest order, but there’s nothing forbidding about this collection of essays which are readable and thought-provoking

The final collection of essays from the internationally acclaimed and bestselling author of The Name of the Rose and The Prague Cemetery, on the subjects of art and culture. 
 
In this collection of essays we find Umberto Eco’s perennial areas of interest explored in a lively and engaging style, accompanied by beautiful reproductions of the art he discusses. In these wide-ranging pieces he explores the roots of our civilization, changing ideas of beauty, our obsession with conspiracies and the emblematic heroes of the great narrative, amongst other fascinating topics. 
 
Umberto Eco was one of the most influential, and entertaining, intellectuals of the last century, as well as being a critically acclaimed and bestselling writer of both fiction and non-fiction.

The Prague Cemetery

Shortlisted for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize 2012 
 
 'Eco's most accessible novel since The Name of the Rose, a temptingly complex tale of 19th-century plots and conspiracies' - Sunday Times

[This] magnificent new novel... marks a return to the heady mixture of absorbing ideas and down-and-dirty historical detail that made The Name of the Rose such an international bestseller in the 1980's

This is a great mystery novel about paranoia, prejudice and forgery... We gain access to a world of city streets, strange anecdotes, gourmet menus, and conspiratorial minds... Eco’s best novel since The Name of the Rose

A smartly entertaining fin-de-siècle romp

An extremely readable narrative of betrayal, terrorism, murder and gourmadising... The great trick Eco pulls off here is to combine the most chilling of ideas - the origin of a hoax that led to genocide - with, elsewhere in the novel, an often funny lightness of touch... In other hands, this novel could have been grim.  But you end up feeling, despite all the darkness, that Eco is one of literature's great optimists

Imagine Dan Brown adorned with a PhD: that's Umberto Eco

Erudite and pop, sinister and passionate... A work destined to become a classic

The Prague Cemetery, snakes along an underground trail that twists through the enlightened heresies and bigoted gospels respectively propagated by Freemasons and Illuminati, Jesuits and Jew-baiters, before hinting at an ideological conspiracy that underlines the deceits of contemporary politics

Perhaps history's first and biggest conspiracy theory

Aided by a translation (from Richard Dixon) that tucks into Eco’s rich period pastiche with relish, the story weaves a fictional master of mischief into actual events… Highly enjoyable in its cunning twists

Has latterly been dubbed the thinking person's Da Vinci Code. But Eco is at home in history in a way that Dan Brown is not... Eco has a sure grasp not only of historical fact but of a period's literature. He's a dab hand at intertextuality... His intent in exposing the moment that lies at the origin of modern anti-Semitism seems to be to show how fictions can have factual consequences. Contemporary spin-doctors take note. Lies, particularly if they follow the pattern of paranoid conspiracies and create an enemy, can have dire effects... Eco is a comic master and, in his 80th year, his irreverent intelligence, if not always his plotting or scabrous taste, remains bracing

There is a great deal of pleasure to be taken in the games Eco plays and in the serious thinking about history and stories that lies beneath them

An extremely readable narrative of betrayal, terrorism, murder… chilling

Nineteenth-century Europe abounds with conspiracy both ghastly and mysterious. Jesuits plot against Freemasons. Italian priests are strangled with their own intestines. French criminals plan bombings by day and celebrate black masses by night. Every nation has its own secret service, perpetrating forgeries, plots, and massacres. 
 
But what if, behind all of these conspiracies, lies just one man?

A conversation curated by Jean-Philippe de Tonnac

This is Not the End of the Book

A storming book. The next best thing to sitting in Umberto Eco's living room after dinner;  a dream collection of lucid and fascinating discussions

Hurrah for philosopher and novelist Umberto Eco and playwright and screenwriter Jean-Claude Carrière, who have come together to praise the medium... Fans of Eco and Carrière will be charmed

An entertainingly free-range dialogue about writing past, present and future

The dialogue between these two superbrains is freakishly compelling and covers everything from papyrus scrolls to e-readers... Never fails to be enlightening and engaging... Hooray for this brilliant book

This book is a reminder that the satisfaction of working through even a relatively short book comes in part through confronting digressions, dead ends and distractions: the hallmark of conversation between friends, not of Internet speed-reading

As the conversation blossoms, the pair wander blissfully off topic into wider philosophical speculation about the nature of culture, for instance or humanity's curious relationship with past, present and future.  And along the way there are plenty of pleasant diversions and anecdotes, taking in such diverse subject matter as Italian cinema forgotten French baroque poets, and the place of philosophy in contemporary European education systems.  All this, naturally, informed by their love of books

They're great thinkers and talkers, with a lifetime of book-loving behind them, the pair digress into fascinating areas, discussing how new media give rise to their own languages, how we came to have the canon of great literature we do now and the effect that ephemerality, memory, religion and even fakery have had on the world of books

A lively exchange of views… it’s fun to eavesdrop on their conversation

Jean-Claude Carrière is a writer, playwright and screenwriter, who recently collaborated with Michael Haneke on his award-winning film The White Ribbon. He has worked with many of the twentieth century's great directors including Peter Brook, Milos Forman, Buñuel and Jean-Luc Godard, and is the author of Please Mr Einstein. 
 
Umberto Eco (1932-2016) wrote fiction, literary criticism and philosophy. His first novel, The Name of the Rose, was a major international bestseller. His other works include Foucault's Pendulum, The Island of the Day Before, Baudolino, The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana, The Prague Cemetery and Numero Zero along with many brilliant collections of essays. 
 
Jean-Philippe de Tonnac is a writer and editor. His interviews with Umberto Eco, Jean-Claude Carrière and Stephen Jay Gould were published in the book Conversations About the End of Time. He is also the editor of several collections of essays, not yet translated into English, which include A Universal Dictionary of Bread andAn Encyclopaedia of Knowledge and Belief.

'The book is like the spoon: once invented, it cannot be bettered' - Umberto Eco. 
 
These days it is impossible to get away from discussions of whether the book will survive the digital revolution. Blogs, tweets and newspaper articles on the subject appear daily, many of them repetitive, most of them admitting ignorance of the future. Amidst the twittering, the thoughts of Jean-Claude Carrière and Umberto Eco come as a breath of fresh air. 
 
This thought-provoking book takes the form of a conversation in which Carrière and Eco discuss everything from how to define the first book to what is happening to knowledge now that infinite amounts of information are available at the click of a mouse. 
 
En route there are delightful digressions into personal anecdote. We find out about Eco's first computer and the book Carrière is most sad to have sold. And while, as Carrière says, the one certain thing about the future is that it is unpredictable, it is clear from this conversation that, in some form or other, the book will survive.

The Name of the Rose

One of 15 limited edition Vintage Future Classics published to celebrate Vintage's 15th birthday. The 15 titles were voted for by reading groups all over the UK as being books that would still be read in 100 years time.

'Umberto Eco has written a novel - his first - and it has become a literary event'

'A novel of stunning intelligence, linguistic richness, thematic complexity'

'This novel belongs with Voltaire' philosophical tales - in the entertaining guise of an erudite fiction story, it is also a vibrant plea for freedom, moderation and wisdom'

Set in Italy in the Middle Ages, this is not only a narrative of a murder investigation in a monastery in 1327, but also a chronicle of the 14th century religious wars, a history of monastic orders, and a compendium of heretical movements.

Hot Wars and Media Populism

Turning Back The Clock

Turning Back the Clock is a brilliant collection of essays by one of the leading intellectuals of our time.

Clever, fluent pieces...a human, sophisticated and wise book

His lively, ironic intelligence dances on a global pincushion

Another collection of nimble, teasing, brilliant and infuriating little essays and essaylets

Eco's greatest virtue might be said to lie in his ability to clarify the exact nature of our present perplexities. Eco is, on the whole, lucid, logical and always firmly on the side of civilisation

After the Cold War, the 'Hot War' has made its comeback in Afghanistan and Iraq. Exhuming Kipling's 'Great Game', we have gone back to the clash between Islam and Christianity. The ghost of the Yellow Peril has been resurrected, the nineteenth-century anti-Darwin debate has been reopened, right-wing governments predominate. 
 
It almost seems like history, tired of the big steps forward it has taken in the past two millennia, has gone into reverse. With his customary sharpness and wit, Eco proposes, not so much that we resume a forward march, but at the very least that we cease marching backwards.

Beautifully bound, hardback edition of Umberto Eco's masterpiece. 
Introduced by David Lodge; Novelist and critic. His novels include Nice Work, Changing Places and The British Museum Is Falling Down, and his critical works include The Language of Fiction and The Novelist at the Crossroads

'[It} confirms Eco as an outstanding writer of philosophy dressed as fiction'

'Eco does something rare: he makes ideas moving'

Who is killing monks in a great medieval abbey famed for its library - and why? Brother William of Baskerville is sent to find out, taking with him the assistant who later tells the tale of his investigations. Eco's celebrated story combines elements of detective fiction, metaphysical thriller, post-modernist puzzle and historical novel in one of the few twentieth-century books which can be described as genuinely unique. 
The Name of the Rose was made into a film in 1986, starring Sean Connery and Christian Slater and directed by Jean-Jacques Annaud.

The Mysterious Flame Of Queen Loana

This remarkable illustrated novel is Eco's most accessible and entertaining book since The Name of the Rose.

Confirms Eco as an outstanding writer of philosophy dressed as fiction

As always with Eco, there is much to admire

A beautiful evocation of a difficult period of Italian history, full of the flair and erudition for which we love Eco

Genuinely clever...the writing, the quotes and the pictures often tickle the brain

Witty, playful, and incorrigibly erudite, Eco clearly had fun writing this book. There is much to enjoy

Another great exhilaration from Eco. Eye-poppingly fascinating

Perhaps the most intellectual novelist in Europe today. A highly idiosyncratic by engrossing novel

Profound and moving. A wonderful entertainer

The opening is delightful, the sort of stuff that has readers rubbing their hands in anticipation...it is good to see Eco recapture something of his former glories, bouncing ideas of his readers with characteristic zest

In this fascinating, abundant new novel from the incomparable Eco, Yambo, a rare-book dealer, has suffered a bizarre form of memory loss. He can remember every book he ever read but nothing about his own life. 
 
In an effort to retrieve his past, he withdraws into his old family home and searches through boxes of old newspapers, comics, records, photo albums and diaries kept in the attic. And so Yambo relives his youth: Mussolini, Catholic education, Josephine Baker, Flash Gordon, Fred Astaire. His memories run wild, and life racing before his eyes takes the form of a graphic novel. Yambo struggles through the flames to capture one simple, innocent image, that of his first love.

On Literature

'A man of robust intellect and genuine erudition...Eco sparkles' - Daily Telegraph

His most personal book so far...this book speaks loudly and persuasively of the redemptive properties of good writing. This book is both a large statement about literary aesthetics and the elliptical spiritual autobiography of a major novelist. Eco writes with characteristic intelligence, clarity, enthusiasm and charm. He seems incapable of writing a dull paragraph, or a wrong-headed one

A good deal of intellectual athleticism on display... Eco is a scintillating lecturer, and an elegant journalist... At his most mercurial

On Literature is a provocative and entertaining collection of sprightly essays on the key texts that have shaped Eco the novelist and critic

Remarkably accessible and unfailingly stimulating, this collection of essays exhibits the diversity of interests and the depth of knowledge that made Umberto Eco one of the world's leading writers. From musings on Ptolemy and reflections on the experimental writing of Borges and Joyce, to revelations of his own authorial ambitions and fears, Eco's luminous intelligence is on display throughout. 
 
This volume will appeal to anyone interested in how new light is shed on old masters by a great contemporary mind.

Baudolino

'A totally compelling journey into a lost world - a masterpiece' Sunday Telegraph

A whirlwind of an adventure- and has everything - myths, marvels, monsters, murders, mysteries

Here is the Eco of The Name of the Rose...poised, mischievous and erudite, the fruit of extraordinary knowledge

[Eco] has given us, in the book's central character, a grand and sympathetic figure in the tradition of Candide and Sancho Panza

Mixing pages of intellectual discussion and exhilarating comedy - further reveals Eco's practically inexhaustible erudition

An extraordinary epic, brilliantly-imagined, new novel from a world-class writer and author of The Name of the Rose. Discover the Middle Ages with Baudolino - a wondrous, dazzling, beguiling tale of history, myth and invention. 
 
It is 1204, and Constantinople is being sacked and burned by the knights of the fourth Crusade. Amid the carnage and confusion Baudolino saves a Byzantine historian and high court official from certain death at the hands of the crusading warriors, and proceeds to tell his own fantastical story.

Five Moral Pieces

'Passionately argued and deeply engaged - Eco's writing has a unique ability to dance on the page and to resonate in the mind' Daily Telegraph

A big hitter takes on big ethical issues... Eco sits himself down in the modern marketplace and notices what is really going on

Eco is one of the most influential thinkers of our time

Cogently argued and periodically sparkles with the kind of wit and insight that readers have come to expect from one of Italy's brightest minds

Embracing the web of multi-culturalism that has become a fact of contemporary life from New York to New Delhi, Eco argues that we are more connected to people of other traditions and customs than ever before, making tolerance the ultimate value in today's world. 
 
What good, he asks in a talk delivered during the Gulf War, does war do in a world where the flow of goods, services, and information is unstoppable, and the enemy is always behind the lines? What makes news today, who decides how it will be presented and how does the way it is disseminated contribute to the widespread disillusionment with politics in general? In one of the most personal of the essays, Eco recalls experiencing liberation from fascism in Italy as a boy, and examines the various historical forms of fascism, always with an eye toward such ugly manifestations today. And finally, in an intensely personal open letter to an Italian Cardinal, Eco reflects on a question underlying all the reflections in the book - what does it mean to be moral or ethical when one doesn't believe in God? 
 
As thoughtful and subtle as they are pragmatic and relevant, these essays present one of the world's most important thinkers at the height of his critical powers.

Foucault's Pendulum

A brilliantly executed intellectual detective story from the author of international best seller The Name of the Rose.

Three editors invent a conspiracy. The world decides it is real. 
 
Casaubon, Belbo and Diotallevi work in a Milan publishing house surrounded by manuscripts on the occult and the Knights Templar. Amused by the pattern-seeking of amateur historians and secret-society enthusiasts, they decide to construct their own grand theory. 
 
What begins as a game becomes ‘The Plan’, an elaborate network of invented connections linking Templars, Rosicrucians, secret codes, and hidden knowledge. The more intricate the fabrication, the more persuasive it feels. 
 
Soon others take it seriously. What was meant as satire begins to attract believers willing to act on the fiction. As coincidence is mistaken for design, Eco exposes how easily the desire for meaning can become a trap.

Brilliant, funny, encompassing everything you ever wanted to know about practically everything (including numerology, James Bond's foes, and the construction of sewers), this book is both extraordinarily learned and well plotted.

Endlessly diverting... Even more intricate and absorbing than his international bestseller The Name of the Rose.

Brilliant... A novel that is deeper and richer than The Name of the Rose.

An intellectual adventure story, as sensational, thrilling, and packed with arcana as Raiders of the Lost Ark or The Count of Monte Cristo.

Umberto Eco is literature's great magician... He offers us many passages of brilliance, and treats us to a Shakespearean alternation of paroxysm and intimacy, madness and wisdom. There is something here for everyone. His genius affords his readers a selection of delights that will make their heads spin.

Three book editors, jaded by reading far too many crackpot manuscripts on the mystic and the occult, are inspired by an extraordinary conspiracy story told to them by a strange colonel to have some fun. They start feeding random bits of information into a powerful computer capable of inventing connections between the entries, thinking they are creating nothing more than an amusing game, but then their game starts to take over, the deaths start mounting, and they are forced into a frantic search for the truth

and Other Essays

How To Travel With A Salmon

From the celebrated author of The Name of the Rose, here is a dazzling compendium of advice offering the correct answers to these and many other important questions.

'Between a bottle of Epsom salts or one of twenty-year-old cognac, which would you choose? Would you rather spend your vacation with an eighty-year old leper or with Demi Moore? Do you prefer being sprinkled with ferocious red ants or sharing a sleeping compartment with Claudia Schiffer?' 
 
From the celebrated author of The Name of the Rose, here is a dazzling compendium of advice offering the correct answers to these and many other important questions. Tackling topics as diverse as the coffee pot from hell, eating on an aeroplane, how not to use a cellular phone and recognising porn movies, Umberto Eco guides us with all his customary wit and brilliance through the complexities of the modern world.

Kant And The Platypus

A playful collection of philosophical critiques from the internationally acclaimed and bestselling author of The Name of the Rose and The Prague Cemetery

Full of jokes, conundra and startling insights...Eco has both moved with the times and moved his discipline along... Few will come to Kant and the Platypus for a bulletin on the world of literary theory...what the general reader will find here is an extraordinary mind at play

A typical Eco book in its scope and vastness of ambition. In his hands, semiotics is transformed from a specialist branch of learning into a theory of everything...readers will not fail to be stimulated

Eco's sensitivity to the mysteries of signification supplies the irony and perceptiveness of his essays. Here, he addresses the mysteries themselves. He does it in characteristic fashion, with wit and invention; but with serious intent too... Eco deploys all his skills of anecdote and illustration, pleasurably decorating an earnest and complicated matter

Umberto Eco is perhaps the leading contemporary representative of the philosophy of semiotics... The discussion is consistently fertile and provocative and provides a wealth of suggestive anecdotes and illustrations

How much do our perceptions of things depend on our cognitive ability, and how much on our linguistic resources? Where, and how, do these two questions meet? Umberto Eco undertakes a series of idiosyncratic and typically brilliant explorations, starting from the perceived data of common sense, from which flow an abundance of 'stories' or fables, often with animals as protagonists, to expound a clear critique of Kant, Heidegger and Peirce. And as a beast designed specifically to throw spanners in the works of cognitive theory, the duckbilled platypus naturally takes centre stage.

Island of the Day Before

‘Every age gets the classics it deserves. I hope we deserve The Island of the Day Before’ – New York Times Book Review

No comparable book has ever existed... The exuberance of the narrative and sheer sumptuousness of the language possess a precision for which everything in Eco's earlier writing had prepared us, but equally a panache for which nothing had

Vintage Eco...full of verbal conjuring: both an enjoyable fable and a skillful parade of recent literary theory and history of science

Every age gets the classics it deserves. I hope we deserve The Island of the Day Before...This novel belings in the great tradition of Swift's Gulliver's Travels, Johnson's Rasselas and Voltaire's Candide. We are left energized, exhilarated by the sheer sensory excitement of the music's telling.

The year is 1643. Roberto, a young nobleman, survives war, the Bastille, exile and shipwreck as he voyages to a Pacific island straddling the date meridian. There he waits now, alone on the mysteriously deserted Daphne, separated by treacherous reefs from the island beyond: the island of the day before. If he could reach it, time - and his misfortunes - might be reversed. But first he must learn to swim...

Faith in Fakes

‘There is enough liveliness here, and enough imaginative suggestiveness, to keep the reader furiously entertained’ - Sunday Times

In the age of innumerable populist polymaths, Eco is the exception, a commentator who makes sense of what so often seems senseless. All the more reason to read him

That he can write with equal agility on such subjects as the World Cup, St Thomas Aquinas, and how the wearing of tight blue jeans constricts the interior life as well as the body...in a a style that is both serious and diverting, is an achievement unparalleled in British journalism

There is enough liveliness here, and enough imaginative suggestiveness, to keep the reader furiously entertained

A scintillating collection of writings by one of the most influential thinkers of our time

Eco is...a highly entertaining and perceptive "decoder" of the world

Holography, wax museums, the secret meaning of spectator sports, Superman and the intellectual effects of over-tight jeans are just a few of the subjects covered in this collection of witty, entertaining and thought-provoking delights from Umberto Eco, celebrated author of The Name of the Rose.

Umberto Eco

Alastair McEwen

Richard Dixon

We are here to remember what happened and to declare solemnly that 'they' must never do it again. But who are 'they'? 
 
HOW TO SPOT A FASCIST is a selection of three thought-provoking essays on freedom and fascism, censorship and tolerance - including Eco's iconic essay 'Ur-Fascism', which lists the fourteen essential characteristics of fascism, and draws on his own personal experiences growing up in the shadow of Mussolini. 
 
Umberto Eco remains one of the greatest writers and cultural commentators of the last century. In these pertinent pieces, he warns against prejudice and abuses of power and proves a wise and insightful guide for our times. 
 
If we strive to learn from our collective history and come together in challenging times, we can hope for a peaceful and tolerant future. 
 
Freedom and liberation are never-ending tasks. Let this be our motto: 'Do not forget.' 
 
'He brilliantly exposes all that is absurd and paradoxical in contemporary behaviour. Eco's irony is disarming, his cleverness dazzling' Guardian

Umberto Eco

Praise for How to Spot a Fascist

He brilliantly exposes all that is absurd and paradoxical in contemporary behaviour. Eco’s irony is disarming, his cleverness dazzling

Books by Umberto Eco

Articles featuring Umberto Eco

The ultimate Eurovision-inspired reading list

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