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This is a guide to the life and work of the French intellectual Georges Bataille, best known as the author of the celebrated erotic novel, The Story of the Eye. Benjamin Noys introduces Bataille as a writer out of step with the dominant intellectual trends of his day - surrealism and existentialism - and shows that it was his very marginality that accounted in large part for his subsequent importance for the post-structuralists and the counterculture, in Europe and in the United States.

Treating Bataille's work as a whole rather than focusing, as other studies have done, on aspects of his work (i.e. as social theory or philosophy), Noys' study is intended to be sensitive to the needs of students new to Bataille's work  while at the same time drawing on the latest research on Bataille to offer new interpretations of Bataille's oeuvre for more experienced readers. This is the first clear, introductory reading of Bataille in English - challenging current reductive readings, and stressing the range of disciplines affected by Bataille's work, at a time when interest in Bataille is growing.

This book presents and interprets archival records of the meetings between Mikhail Gorbachev and George W. Bush between 1989 and 1991, including transcripts of conversations between top leaders on the rapid and monumental events of the final days of the Cold War. Particularly effective interlocutors were the foreign ministers Eduard Shevardnadze and James Baker, especially interesting when they interacted directly with Bush or Gorbachev. The documents were obtained from the Gorbachev Foundation and the Russian State Archives and from the United States government through requests under the Freedom of Information Act. Taking place at a time of revolutionary change in Eastern Europe, stimulated in part by Gorbachev and by Eastern Europeans (the Solidarity movement, dissidents, reform communists), the Malta Summit of 1989 and subsequent meetings helped defuse any potential for superpower conflict. Each of the five summits is covered in a separate chapter, introduced by an essay that places the transcripts in historical context. The anthology offers a fascinating glimpse into the relationship that defined the last, waning years of the Cold War—a unique record of these historic, highest-level conversations that effectively brought it to a close. The quality and scope of the dialogue between these world leaders was unprecedented and is likely never to be repeated.

This book is the culmination of twenty years of research in which the editors gathered thousands of pages documenting the most important conversations of the late Cold War. Every word Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev said to each other in their five superpower summits from 1985 to 1988 is included in this volume. The editors argue in their contextual essays and detailed notes that these summits fueled a learning process on both sides of the Cold War. Their anthology provides insight into the nuanced shifts of monumentally important discussions, showing how Moscow’s sense of threat was eased and how a hawkish Reagan softened his tone in negotiations during his second presidential term. Documents from foreign ministers Eduard Shevardnadze and George Shultz offer a particularly intriguing look into the handful of conversations that ended almost half a century of conflict. These verbatim transcripts, until now top secret, are combined with fascinating photos and crucial information from declassified preparatory and after-action documents from both the Americans and Soviets, obtained in the US through the Freedom of Information Act and in Russia from the Gorbachev Foundation, the State Archive of the Russian Federation in Moscow, and from the personal files of Anatoly Chernyaev, Gorbachev’s foreign policy adviser.

Based on unprecedented access to information, Government and Politics in Hungary provides not only a historical overview but also an analysis of the main political actors, constitution, electoral system, parliament and political parties of Hungary.This timely and detailed analysis contains a wealth of important data which serves two major objectives. The first is to survey the most important institutions of the political and governmental systems and the cultural and behavioural characteristics of Hungarian politics. The second, is to provide the reader with a clear understanding of the two-way relationship between cultural-behavioural and constitutional-institutional levels of politics in Hungary. The book challenges many stereotypes of post-communist political literature and reveals why Hungarian politics does not fit into many of the generalizations and 'pigeon holes' of contemporary political science.

An exemplary study in comparative contemporary history, this monograph looks at rural change in six countries: Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Romania and Slovakia. In the 1990s most of these nations experienced a fourth radical restructuring of agricultural relations in the twentieth century, and all went through the dramatic transition from communism to capitalism. The author analyzes attempts to activate democracy on a local level and recreate farming structures and non-agricultural businesses based on private ownership and private enterprise. He describes the emergence of a new business class that seeks to dominate local government structures; the recuperation of former communist farming entities by former managers; and the transformation of peasants into rural citizens, who nevertheless remain the underdogs. Swain exposes common features as well as specific divergences between the six countries; he portrays the winners, losers and engineers of transformations. He situates his themes in a wider context that will appeal to a broad range of social scientists and historians.