DO YOU WANT BETTER CONVERSATIONS with your lover, your colleagues at work, your family, friends or strangers, or yourself? CONVERSATION explains what kind of talk charmed and excited people in the past, and why we talk differently today. It explores the art and the history of conversation and how it can be the key to a happier, more interesting future. It shows how women have changed the ways lovers speak, how families avoid silence or boredom, how your work can damage or improve the way you converse, and what role there is for the tongue-tied and shy. This book will enable you to see more clearly what you want to talk about, and what conversation can do to your life.

CONVERSATION began as a series of talks broadcast on the BBC. They proved to be so popular that they were recently published in book form to great success in Britain and throughout Europe.

THEODORE ZELDIN, a fellow and former dean of St Antony's College Oxford, has been internationally hailed as "one of the forty world figures whose ideas are likely to have a lasting relevance to the new millennium" (Independent on Sunday, U.K.) and "one of the hundred most important thinkers in the world" (Magazine litteraire, France). He is best known in the United States as the author of AN INTIMATE HISTORY OF HUMANITY, which offered a unique and provocative perspective on human history by focusing on the evolution of feelings and personal relationships. Time magazine called it "an intellectually dazzling view of our past and future." He is a member of the BBC Brains Trust, the British Academy and the European Academy.