Bøker av John Keane

The definitive biography of Tom Paine, published to coincide with the 200th anniversary of his death

In China's Galaxy Empire, John Keane and Baogang He target a development of enormous significance: China's return, after two centuries of decline and subjugation, to a position of prominence in world affairs. The daring thesis is that China is a newly rising empire of a kind never before witnessed: a galaxy empire. The galaxy empire interpretation rejects clichéd misdescriptions of China as a "big power", and it explains why China defies older definitions of land, sea, and air-based empires. The book warns against the perils of simple-minded, friend-versus-enemy thinking and "Big China, Bad China" politics, but it also proffers a forewarning to China's rulers: no empire lasts forever, and some are stillborn, because they indulge illusions of greatness and reckless power adventures.

One day they'll be like us. That was once the West's complacent assumption about countries emerging from poverty, imperial rule, or communism. But many have hardened into something very different from liberal democracy: what eminent political thinker John Keane describes as a new form of despotism. And one day, he warns, we may be more like them.

Vaclav Havel is revered as one of the 20th-century's great playwrights, dissidents, and honest champions of democracy. This study reveals a Havel, dramatising the key moments of joy, misery, triumph and tragedy on which his life has turned.

This work looks anew at the belief that we are in an era of more intense violence than ever experienced before. It includes a demonstration of how the term "violence" is riddled with paradoxes. There is also an examination of the prospects for greater civility which rejects simple-minded pacifism.