This isn't the only impulse that impels humans to be violent - Hobbes also mentions the desire for gain and the love of glory - but it is fundamental in his account of how they escape from violence.

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Lately emin has been spending a lot of time exploring notions of love and the limits of desire.

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Where better, Mr de Botton asks, to feel that pang of desire than spotting a potential love interest across the food hall of a motorway service station - isolated, vulnerable and even unhappy.

BBC: View of M1 from Newport Pagnall service station

It's a desire that, because of the excess, destroys love.

BBC: Viewpoint: Down with romantic love

Yet the wonder of his achievement is that it's deeply serious and blissfully funny at the same time, because it's also about yearning and desire, fantastic flights of language, the persistence of hope and the possibility of healing love.

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That Mr. Zulawski found a fertile subject early on in the fallout of desire and obsession is evident in two vivid shorts made for Polish television, both involving love triangles: "Pavoncello" (1967), based on a story by Stefan Zeromski, and "The Song of Triumphant Love" ("Piesn triumfujacej milosci, " 1967), from a tale by Ivan Turgenev.

WSJ: Andrzej Zulawski | Cinefamily | BAMcin��matek | Love and Madness