Profile Books

Can playing shoot-em-ups make you tougher? Can paracetamol help with humiliation as well as headaches? Join Dr Emma Byrne, author of Swearing is Good For You, to relive some of the inventively painful experiments that have unlocked the relationship between emotion and pain. Audience participation is only for the brave!

28th October is a historic date in the modern Greek calendar: 'OXI' (NO!) day, the date when in 1940 dictator Metaxas said NO to the Italian would-be occupiers. Say YES to a day of fascinating talks from a range of top authors from the world of Classics, including Paul Cartledge, Adrian Goldsworthy, Edith Hall, Natalie Haynes, Kathryn Lomas, Catherine Nixey, Bijan Omrami, Ian Ross, Michael Scott, Kathryn Tempest and Jerry Toner. There will, of course, also be the return of the ever-popular balloon debate!

The Jewish joke is as old as Abraham, and like the Jews themselves it has wandered over the world, learned countless new languages, worked with a range of different materials, been performed in front of some pretty hostile crowds, but still retained its own distinctive identity. So what is it that animates the Jewish joke? Why are Jews so often thought of as 'funny'? And how old can a joke get? The Jewish Joke is a brilliant - and very funny - riff on Jewish jokes, about what marks them apart from other jokes, why they are important to Jewish identity and how they work. Ranging from self-deprecation to anti-Semitism, politics to sex, it looks at the past of Jewish joking and asks whether the Jewish joke has a future. With jokes from Woody Allen, Lena Dunham and Jerry Seinfeld, as well as Freud and Marx (Groucho mostly), this is both a compendium and a commentary, light-hearted and deeply insightful.