Michael Foley

The good news is that the great thinkers from history have proposed the same strategies for happiness and fulfilment. The bad news is that these turn out to be the very things most discouraged by contemporary culture. This knotty dilemma is the subject of The Age of Absurdity - a wry and accessible investigation into how the desirable states of wellbeing and satisfaction are constantly undermined by modern life. Michael Foley examines the elusive condition of happiness common to philosophy, spiritual teachings and contemporary psychology, then shows how these are becoming increasingly difficult to apply in a world of high expectations. The common challenges of earning a living, maintaining a relationship and ageing are becoming battlegrounds of existential angst and self-loathing in a culture that demands conspicuous consumption, high-octane partnerships and perpetual youth. In conclusion, rather than denouncing and rejecting the age, Foley presents an entertaining strategy of not just accepting but embracing today's world - finding happiness in its absurdity.

Why Modern Life Makes it Hard to be Happy

The Age of Absurdity

A satirical novel set in Ireland on the literary world and its hangers-on. The hero is Kyle Magee, the "Zorba of the North," and he subjects the starry-eyed narrator to all the pretension, hypocrisy and paranoia he can handle. Counter balancing this is the Herron household comprising no-nonsense women, two of whom hero and narrator eventually marry. A debut in fiction.

The Road to Notown

Algan Sezgintüredi

Modern hayat neden mutlu olmayı zorlaştırıyor?

Saçmalıklar çağı

The School of Life

Henri Bergson was a French professor and philosopher. Born in Paris in 1859 to a Polish composer and Yorkshire woman of Irish descent, his revelatory ideas of life as process and the importance of duration, comedy and joy brought him incredible fame and media celebrity. Here you will find extracts from his greatest works. The Life Lessons series from The School of Life takes a great thinker and highlights those ideas most relevant to ordinary everyday dilemmas. These books emphasise ways in which wise voices from the past have urgently important and inspiring things to tell us. This book is introduced and edited by Michael Foley, bestselling author of The Age of Absurdity and Embracing the Ordinary.

Life Lessons from Bergson

It has always been difficult to appreciate everyday life, often devalued as dreary, banal and burdensome, and never more so than in a culture besotted with fantasy, celebrity and glamour. Yet many writers, artists, film-makers and photographers have celebrated the ordinary life around them, and many philosophers, anthropologists, psychologists and neuroscientists have offered insights into the difficulties and rewards of paying attention to the here and now. With characteristic wit and earthiness, Michael Foley - author of the bestselling The Age of Absurdity- draws on the work of these artists and thinkers, and encourages us to delight in the complexities of everyday psychopathology. With astute observation, Foley brings fresh insights to such things as the banality of everyday speech, the madness and weirdness of snobbery, love and sex, and the strangeness of everyday objects and the everyday environment, such as the office. It is all more fascinating, comical and mysterious than you think.

Lessons From the Champions of Everyday Life

Embracing the Ordinary

On the 19th September 1982 Kerry ran out in Croke Park chasing immortality. Victory over Offaly in the All-Ireland football final would secure them five titles in a row, a record certain never to be matched again. It had taken Offaly six heartbreaking years under manager Eugene McGee to drag themselves up from their lowest ebb, but now they stood on the cusp of a glorious reward. The result was a classic final that changed lives and dramatically altered the course of gaelic football history. The Kings of September is an epic story of triumph and loss, joy and tragedy, a story of two teams who illuminated a grim period in Irish life and enthralled a nation.

The Day Offaly Denied Kerry Five in a Row

Kings of September

This historical study examines how the Bolshevik Revolution and Russian Civil War influenced events on the world stage in the Great War and beyond. The Russian Revolution of 1917 is remembered as the catalyst for a bloody conflict between the Communist Red Army and the anti-Communist White Army. But in reality, the conflict was far more complex and multifaceted, involving forces from outside Russia. In this probing history, Michael Foley examines the Russian Civil War in terms of its relationship to the larger conflict raging across Europe. It is an epic tale of brutal violence and political upheaval featuring a colorful cast of characters—including Tsar Nicholas II, Vladimir Lenin, Leon Trotsky, Joseph Stalin and Winston Churchill.

Red Terror, White Terror, 1917–1922

Russian Civil War

The East End of London has always been looked down on by those who live in the rest of the capital. Jack London's People Of the Abyss is just one of the many books written about the poverty, crime and suffering that has blighted the East End throughout the past. As what is now the East End spread out towards Essex, however, the picture has become very different. Many areas such as Bethnal Green, West Ham and Forest Gate were once small rural villages. Not only has the East End been a centre of poverty but it has also been where many of the worst disasters to occur in London have happened. Among the streets of small terraced houses, however, there are often areas of surprising beauty with parks that have survived from the middle ages and houses that were once lived in by a more affluent population. The East End has always been a contrast of rich and poor, mansion and slum, throughout history.

London's East End Through Time

An illustrated history one of England's finest cities - London and its famous East End.

Historic England: London's East End

A guided tour of London's East End, showing how this famous port has changed over the past century and more.

London's East End History Tour

It is easy to believe that the only part that Britain’s railways played in the First World War was to carry the soldiers to the ships that would take them to France. This couldn’t be further from the truth. Without the help from the railways it is unlikely that the war would have been over as quickly as it was. In Britain’s Railways in the First World War Michael Foley examines how the railway system and its workers proved to be a vital part of the war effort, one contemporary writer even commenting that he thought they were as significant as the navy. The book describes how the enlistment of railway troops for the Royal Engineers to meet the increasing transport demands of the military was to bleed the civilian system dry as skilled railwaymen were sent to work at the front. In addition, the military commandeered thousands of Britain’s railway vehicles, sending them to each of the theatres of war, and turned the already stressed railway workshops away from maintaining what remained of the country’s railways and rolling stock so they could produce armaments for the forces instead. The book also reveals how the British were so far behind their enemies and allies in the use of railway support to the front lines that they had to plead for help from Canada.

Britain's Railways in the First World War

This fascinating selection of photographs shows how Ilford has changed and developed over the last century.

Ilford Through Time

The Politics of the British Constitution provides the first major assessment of the properties, dynamics and implications of the new area of political exchange.

The Politics of the British Constitution

Michael Foley wants to understand why he doesn't appear to be experiencing as much 'fun' as everyone else. So, with characteristic wit and humour, he sets out to understand what fun really means, examining its heritage, its cultural significance and the various activities we associate with fun. He investigates pursuits such as dancing, sex, holidays, sport, gaming, and comedy, and concludes that fun is not easy, simple and fixed, as many seem to believe, but elusive, complex and constantly changing. In fact, fun is a profoundly serious business, a range of new group rituals evolving in response to cultural developments, often motivated as much by spirituality as hedonism. Also, while fun is a modern phenomenon it turns out to have recreated many of the elements of early ritual. His findings will invigorate you with insights, make you laugh at life, and quite possibly help you to understand why the post-post-modern is actually the pre-pre-modern.

Investigating the Serious Business of Enjoying Ourselves

Isn't This Fun?

Walter Cronkite

Truman deployed the atom bomb, established the United Nations, and enacted the containment policy of Communist aggression that lasted throughout the close of the twentieth century.

Harry S. Truman

Eigenlijk weten we heel goed wat ons gelukkig maakt: voldoende tijd, ruimte om te leven, rust om ons te bezinnen. Jammer alleen dat dat nu juist de dingen zijn waaraan we vrijwel niet toekomen, omdat we zo druk bezig zijn de dingen na te jagen waarvan we dénken dat we gelukkig worden. Ziehier de tegenstelling van onze tijd, en het onderwerp van Absurde overvloed. Michael Foley stelt niet voor dat we ons van de werkelijkheid moeten afkeren, maar laat zien dat we onze absurde wereld kunnen omarmen: er is veel plezier te beleven aan absurditeit, als je maar de tijd neemt er goed naar te kijken en erover na te denken.

waarom het zo moeilijk is om gelukkig te worden

Absurde overvloed

- Als je waar ook ter wereld zou kunnen zijn, waar zou je dan willen zijn? - Precies waar ik nu ben. Zo begint een interview met Michael Foley, die ons leert onze wereld te aanvaarden. In Absurde overvloed stelde hij de vraag: hoe komt het dat we zelden nastreven waar we gelukkig van worden? Ruimte, tijd, stilte, daarbij vaart de mens wel, maar we zoeken de drukte op en hebben altijd haast. In Lang leve het gewone formuleert hij een antwoord. In het voetspoor van kunstenaars, filosofen en psychologen beschrijft hij wat de moeite waard kan zijn in ons gewone leven. `Doe maar gewoon, dan doe je al gek genoeg, wordt er wel eens gezegd. Foley laat zien dat dit een zeer inspirerende aanmoediging kan zijn.

de lessen van het alledaagse leven

Lang leve het gewone

Political leadership continues to be marked by a mixture of high-end exposure and low-end explanation. This book gives full weight to the material prominence of leaders and to the way that leadership operates as a medium of political themes, issues and concepts. At the same time, the aim is to reduce the dissonance associated with the study of leadership, fragmented as it is, into discrete studies, multiple approaches, and priority disputes based upondisciplinary boundaries. The book aims to put the subject of political leadership back together within a more integrated framework, and provides an in-depth engagement with leadership's analytical challenges whilst retaining illustrative space for the immediacy, allure and drama of leadership in action.

Themes, Contexts, and Critiques

Political Leadership

Traversing the welter and squalor of London, Paris, Madrid, Rome and New York, celebrating afresh the familiar and mundane - bread, soap, matches and snails - Foley's latest collection culminates in a powerful sequence of poems that looks at age, mortality, loss, failure, disappointment and envy with unflinching honesty, wry humour and, ultimately, affirmation. Autumn Beguiles the Fatalist retains the qualities praised in Michael Foley's earlier poetry - disconcerting candour, rhythmic vitality, mordant wit and readability.

Michael Foley

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