Having the world’s greatest living philosopher all to myself for a few hours was a rare privilege. It was February, and the ground was covered in ice and snow We both fell over.
In the mid-1980s, on assignment for the London Observer, I was shown around Harvard University by Willard van Orman Quine. PART FOUR THE COUNTER-CULTURE TO KOSOVO The View from Nowhere, The View from Everywhere PART THREE SARTRE TO THE SEA OF TRANQUILITY The New Human Condition and The Great Societyģ0 EQUALITY, FREEDOM, AND JUSTICE IN THE GREAT SOCIETY PART TWO SPENGLER TO ANIMAL FARM Civilisations and Their Discontents PART ONE FREUD TO WITTGENSTEIN The Sense of a Beginning Introduction AN EVOLUTION IN THE RULES OF THOUGHT Terrible Beauty, endlessly stimulating and provocative, affirms that there was much more to the twentieth century than war and genocide.An Intellectual History of the 20th Century We meet in these pages the other twentieth century, the writers, the artists, the scientists and philosophers who were not cowed by the political and military disasters raging around them, and produced some of the most amazing and rewarding ideas by which we live. Beginning with four seminal ideas which were introduced in 1900 - the unconscious, the gene, the quantum and Picasso's first paintings in Paris - the book brings together the main areas of thought and juxtaposes the most original and influential ideas of our time in an immensely readable narrative.įrom the creation of plastic to Norman Mailer, from the discovery of the 'Big Bang' to the Counterculture, from Relativity to Susan Sontag, from Proust to Salman Rushdie, and Henri Bergson to Saul Bellow, the book's range is encyclopaedic. Unlike more conventional histories, where the focus is on political events and personalities, on wars, treaties and elections, this book concentrates on the ideas that made the century so rich, rewarding and provocative.
TERRIBLE BEAUTY presents a unique narrative of the twentieth century. 'A magnificent achievement' LITERARY REVIEW 'Breathtakingly entertaining, endlessly instructive, irresistibly enjoyable' THE TIMES
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