What is love's real intent? Why can love be so ruthlessly selective? How is it related to sex, beauty, and goodness? And is the child now the supreme object of love? In addressing these questions, Simon May develops a radically new understanding of love as the emotion we feel towards whomever or whatever we experience as grounding our life--as offering us a possibility of home in a world that we supremely value. He sees love as motivated by a promise of "ontological rootedness," rather tha...

"What is love? May plunders Western poetry, philosophy and psychology to find answers . . . Thought-provoking stuff" ( The Sunday Telegraph).Love—unconditional, selfless, unchanging, sincere, and totally accepting—is worshipped today as the West's only universal religion. To challenge it is one of our few remaining taboos. In this path-breaking and superbly written book, philosopher Simon May does just that, dissecting our ideas of love and showing how the...

An exploration of cuteness and its immense hold on us, from emojis and fluffy puppies to its more uncanny, subversive expressionsCuteness has taken the planet by storm. Global sensations Hello Kitty and Pokémon, the works of artists Takashi Murakami and Jeff Koons, Heidi the cross-eyed opossum and E.T.—all reflect its gathering power. But what does “cute” mean, as a sensibility and style? Why is it so pervasive? Is it all infantile fluff, or is there something more...

“Last spring I went to Rocky Crossing again. New green grass was sprouting on the high ridge of the road that led there, and now and then there grew a persimmon shoot, or a small hickory, where a nut had fallen and opened deep in the untrampled earth. But the ruts made long ago by passing wagons were still there, guiding the wheels of our car through the dense forest, around the boulders and between the tall trees. I was like a ghost returning to a place once loved.”These ...

'A lyrical, fascinating, important book. More than just a family story, it is an essay on belonging, denying, pretending, self-deception and, at least for the main characters, survival.' Literary Review'Simon May's remarkable How to Be a Refugee is a memoir of family secrets with a ruminative twist, one that's more interested in what we keep from ourselves than the ones we conceal from others.' Irish TimesThe most...

Do you repeatedly defer life to later, convinced there will come a time when you'll be better prepared to seize its opportunities?Do you spend your best hours on chores or trivia before allowing yourself to get to what most matters to you?The real mystery of procrastination is why we avoid goals to which we're passionately committed. It's understandable that we'd put off cleaning the fridge or completing our tax return; but why do we swerve...

As the first British Professor of Philosophy since 1882 to be invited to teach at the prestigious and enigmatic University of Tokyo - the Oxbridge of Japan - Simon May enjoyed a degree of access denied to other commentators. Each chapter of the book focuses on some everyday human matter, such as love, death, bureaucracy, hygiene, food, toilets, commuting, education, marriage and memory. Japanese attitudes to such issues are explored through a mixture of light-hearted anecdote and trenchant...

Bobby the Blackbird sets out on a little adventure to see the King of England at his palace in London. Bobby meets his new little friends, Owl, Red Robin, Duck and Seagull, and they each join him on his journey. Along the way they see the ravens on top of the tower and ask them for help in finding the King. The ravens take them to the palace where they find the King and his golden crown. A perfect little short adventure story for very young children who can see the colourful characters com...

The belief in a governing, celestial principle has long been an essential element of human society worldwide. More than 80% of the worlds population has a religious affiliation and even in secular states, religion continues to play an important role. Politics and international relations today cannot be understood without accounting for the religious context of a societys history. The essays in this volume explore religion and spirituality as both a societal force and an individual experien...

The most familiar fate of Jews living in Hitler’s Germany is either emigration or deportation to concentration camps. But there was another, much rarer, side to Jewish life at that time: denial of your origin to the point where you manage to erase almost all consciousness of it. You refuse to believe that you are Jewish.How to Be a Refugee is Simon May’s gripping account of how three sisters – his mother and his two aunts – grappled with what they felt to be a lethal herit...

Businesses spend billions on innovation with very little to show for their investment or effort. This book challenges some of the ‘ingrained truths’ of innovation and suggests a different approach.Innovation is not the creation of a novel idea. It is the successful commercialisation of that novel idea. Rather than starting with a costly, time-consuming problem assessment that seeks to push potential solutions through an innovation funnel, an ‘impeller approach’ starts with possible...

The principal aim of this volume is to elucidate what freedom, sovereignty, and autonomy mean for Nietzsche and what philosophical resources he gives us to re-think these crucial concepts. A related aim is to examine how Nietzsche connects these concepts to his thoughts about life-affirmation, self-love, promise-making, agency, the 'will to nothingness', and the 'eternal recurrence', as well as to his search for a 'genealogical' understanding of morality. These twelve essays by leading Nie...