Robin Lane Fox Livres

An award-winning historian of antiquity, Robin Lane Fox is also one of Britain’s foremost gardening experts, and in Thoughtful Gardening he takes readers on a varied and highly enjoyable journey through each season of the gardening year. From a tender eulogy for one of his landscape design mentors to a candid consideration of global warming’s effects on his lupins or the perfect shrub to grow in shade along a path, Fox brings his trademark wit, wisdom, and charm to bear on the art and experience of gardening. Essential reading for anyone planting a new garden or taking stock of one after several years, this collection offers valuable critiques of horticultural trends and traditions, and essential insights into gardening practices and philosophies. Taken together these essays form—season by season—a rich reflection on the lessons, challenges, and absurdities of life with a green thumb.

Like its heroes Homer's Iliad has earned immortal glory. It is the sublime Greek epic poem which tells of the anger of Achilles, and its dreadful consequences for persons and events during the war at Troy. Great questions still remain for its many readers: where, how and when it was composed and why it has such exceptional power. Robin Lane Fox applies his life-long love and engagement with the poem to answer them, deepening and enhancing what we will find in it as a result. Long planned, compellingly written and conceived, it is a memorable tribute to the poem underlying many of his own books.

Tough, resolute, fearless, Alexander was a born warrior and ruler of passionate ambition who understood the intense adventure of conquest and of the unknown. When he died in 323 BC aged thirty-two, his vast empire comprised more than two million square miles, spanning from Greece to India. His achievements were unparalleled - he had excelled as leader to his men, founded eighteen new cities and stamped the face of Greek culture on the ancient East. The myth he created is as potent today as it was in the ancient world. Robin Lane Fox�s superb account searches through the mass of conflicting evidence and legend to focus on Alexander as a man of his own time. Combining historical scholarship and acute psychological insight, it brings this colossal figure vividly to life.

The Bible is moving, inspirational and endlessly fascinating - but is it true? Starting with Genesis and the implicit background to the birth of Christ, the author sets out to discover how far biblical descriptions of people, places and events are confirmed or contradicted by external written and archaeological evidence.

Follows Augustine on a brilliantly-described journey, combining the latest scholarship with recently-found letters and sermons by Augustine himself, to give a portrait of his subject which is subtly different from older biographies. Augustine's heretical years as a Manichaean, his relation to non-Christian philosophy, his mystical aspirations and the nature of his conversion are among the aspects of his life which stand out in a sharper light. The author compares him with two contemporaries, an older pagan and a younger Christian, each of whom also wrote about themselves, and who illumine Augustine's life and writings by their different choices. More than a decade passed between Augustine's conversion and his beginning the Confessions. The author argues that the Confessions and their thinking were the results of a long gestation over these years, not a sudden change of perspective.

"Religion and the religious life from the second to the fourth century A.D. when the gods of Olympus lost their dominion and Christianity, with the conversion of Constantine, triumphed in the Mediterranean world"--Jacket subtitle

"In Augustine, celebrated historian Robin Lane Fox follows Augustine of Hippo on his journey to the writing of his Confessions. Unbaptized, Augustine indulged in a life of lust before finally confessing and converting. Lane Fox recounts Augustine's sexual sins, his time in an outlawed heretical sect, and his gradual return to spirituality. Magisterial and beautifully written, Augustine is the authoritative portrait of this colossal figure at his most thoughtful, vulnerable, and profound." --Publisher

Fox traces our ongoing struggle to maintain open societies in the face of profoundly tribal human needs that, paradoxically, hold the key to our survival. This latest book ranges from incest and arranged marriage to poetry and myth, from human rights and vengeance to pop icons such as Seinfeld.

From the foundation of the world's first democracy in Athens to the Roman Republic and the Empire under Hadrian, this title presents the turbulent histories of Greece and Rome together. Discussing figures such as Homer, Socrates, Alexander, Julius Caesar, Augustus and the first Christian martyrs, it explores freedom, justice, and luxury.