Watson clearly thinks that some distinction can be made between “cultural” and “intellectual” advances, and that the history of ideas is to some degrees independent of political events. Judging from what Watson has to say about postmodernism, identifying it with recent trends in French philosophy that have put too much stock in Marx and Freud, it’s likely he would disagree. It was the observation of Marx, for example, that ideas are merely the product of social and economic forces. Writing a history of ideas involves tricky questions of influence. In A Terrible Beauty, subtitled “A History of the People and Ideas that Shaped the Modern Mind,” author Peter Watson sets out to correct this bias by taking an encyclopedic look at the intellectual heritage of the century that was. A Terrible Beauty, endlessly stimulating and provocative, affirms that there was much more to the twentieth century than war and genocide.A TERRIBLE BEAUTY: A HISTORY OF THE PEOPLE AND IDEAS THAT SHAPED THE MODERN MINDĪmong the recent flood of books on the history of the twentieth century the focus has mostly been on political and military events. 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. From 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 encyclopedic. 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.

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. A Terrible Beauty presents a unique narrative of the twentieth century.

A terrible beauty peter watson