“umberto eco”

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 conne... More

An extraordinary, epic, brilliantly-imagined, new novel from a world-class writer. Eco returns to the Middle Ages with Baudolino - a wondrous, provocative, beguiling tale of history, myth, and invention. It is April, 1204, and Constantinople, the splendid capital of the Byzantine Empire, is being sa... More

This remarkable illustrated novel is Eco's most accessible and bestselling book since The Name of the Rose. Yambo, a sixty-ish rare book dealer who lives in Milan has suffered a loss of memory; not the kind of memory neurologists call 'semantic' (Yambo remembers all about Julius Caesar and can recit... More

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-wi... More

On August 16, 1968, I was handed a Book Written by a Certain Abbe Vallet, Le Manuscrit de Dom Adson de Melk, traduit en francais d'apres l edition de Dom J. Mabillon. Supplemented by historical information that was actually quite scant, the book claimed to reproduce faithfully a 14th century manuscr... More

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 bef... More

How we know that a cat is a cat is a nice philosophical poser, and has been since the time of Plato. Why we should all agree on calling the animal a cat is equally interesting, yet it throws up the problem that lies at the heart of all modern philosophy: how much do our perceptions of things depend... More