A Terrible Beauty Peter Watson

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This book has come in for an enormous amount of criticism, but its attackers have lost sight of the author's incredible ambition - a chronicle of the most important ideas of the 20th century. Remember this was a period when in just a few fields, the total sum of knowledge was doubling every few years. Of course a lot had to be left out, for example you will not find a discussion of Henry Ford and his ground breaking assembly line, even though arguably mass production is also one of the key shaping events of the 20th century. While you could nitpick about what is an idea as opposed to an event, in no other book I have encountered, does the author display such an incredible even handed scholarship. He has performed a unique service to any reader keen to quickly get up to speed on the essentials of recent intellectual history, in an entertaining way. Even the casual browser will rapidly achieve the status of feared opponent in argument at any dinner party, or muscular Radio 4 discussion programme. If you do not find something of interest in this book, which ranges over practically the entire gamut of hard and social science's lasting recent achievements, then the lights are on, but no one is home.