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‘Artificial intelligence (AI)’ is a loaded term, rife with connotative contradiction that inspires debate, disagreement, and disillusion. But what is AI, really? How have our expectations of computational capability, and even a robot Armageddon, come to be? Why does it matter how we talk about increasingly sophisticated technology, not just in expository prose, but also in fiction?
![](https://reviews.history.ac.uk/sites/reviews/files/styles/thumbnail/public/images/bloxham1.jpg?itok=lnKzzO-d)
The sub-branch of history that is known by the ambiguous (and frightening to undergraduates, cats, and many mainstream academics) name “historiography” seems to be undergoing a Renaissance at the moment.
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This is an extremely ambitious, thought-provoking, challenging and inspiring book.
![](https://reviews.history.ac.uk/sites/reviews/files/styles/thumbnail/public/images/copenhaver.jpg?itok=wOn3cPF8)
Frances Yates’ seminal book Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition (1964), which established a longstanding scholarly orthodoxy that Renaissance magic derived from interpretations of the Hermetic Corpus, has been challenged in its details by Bruno scholars and others.
![](https://reviews.history.ac.uk/sites/reviews/files/styles/thumbnail/public/images/Buc.jpg?itok=c8CqNNdw)
This book is concerned with the paradoxes and oxymora (p. 80) inherent in a longue-durée of Western thought, rooted in Christian theology, about political and religious violence: liberty and coercion; violence and peace; cruelty and mercy; shedding blood to achieve peace; violence and martyrdom, election and universalism, old and new, and even, in a sense, the state and the church.
![](https://reviews.history.ac.uk/sites/reviews/files/styles/thumbnail/public/images/macculloch.jpg?itok=RgrVzovy)
Silence speaks as a visual conceit through the serene icon of Mary Magdalene, chosen to illustrate the dust jacket enfolding Silence: A Christian History, foreshadowing themes in Diarmaid MacCulloch’s magisterial study.
![](https://reviews.history.ac.uk/sites/reviews/files/styles/thumbnail/public/images/hirschi.jpg?itok=4CajUe9V)
The study of nationality (a term used to designate historically and constitutively diverse nations) poses a number of acute methodological, historical, and philosophical problems.
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This is a short book on a big topic. It seeks to challenge the standard narrative of European political thought, by offering a sharply revisionist account of its foundations.
![](https://reviews.history.ac.uk/sites/reviews/files/styles/thumbnail/public/images/Le_Monde_.png?itok=__pkJejm)
Reports of the death of the Mediterranean – on some accounts from pollution, on others from conceptual redundancy – have proved exaggerated. Conceptually, at least, ‘The Mediterranean’ flourishes as never before: an idea more than a sea. It seems ubiquitous on web sites and in book and journal titles as well as on conference posters, not to mention political action plans.
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In 1994 I published a now widely cited and highly regarded volume entitled Immigration, Ethnicity and Racism in Britain, 1815–1914 (1), which, at the time, faced critical comment.