6 books about truth and freedom of speech

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Reading lists

The Rise and Fall of Adam and Eve

The Story that Created Us

Pulitzer Prize-winner Stephen Greenblatt tackles the origins of humanity through the most enduring story of all time.

A compelling, all-encompassing story of myth, theology and belief ... He delves deftly and lucidly into theology... Fascinating

Thrilling … a study of western disenchantment, of intellectual progress, of the fading powers of the myths of a simpler age. But it is a more complex study than that. It is also an ode to human creativity and to the powerful grip of narrative

Enthralling, thrilling… Along the way, there is an often hilarious account of scholastic efforts to rationalise the myth’s illogic, and an array of entertaining heresies… What gives Greenblatt’s “intellectual adventure” its tension and excitement is a sense of his own divided loyalties

Erudite, wide-ranging, thought-provoking and elegantly fashioned

Greenblatt, on excellent form here, visits familiar destinations ... with fresh eyes, and opens up new interpretative vistas ... Hefty themes are covered in this spellbinding book, but the learning is worn lightly.

This is a learned book, but Greenblatt’s passion for story-telling makes it read like a series of fascinating anecdotes… The Rise and Fall of Adam and Eve is exhilarating to read and a feast for the mind

Greenblatt's inexhaustible curiosity goes without saying; what makes this book a wonder is its passion … nothing less than a love story, a hymn. Who would have thought scholarship could be so ardent or so poignant?

Howard Jacobson, winner of the MAN Booker Prize

Pellucid, absorbing and for many contemporary readers surely definitive account

Tunnelling upwards from the murky beginnings of our origin myth through its myriad interpretations by Augustine, Michelangelo, Durer, Milton, Darwin and more, this riveting book raises essential questions about the nature of narrative.

Greenblatt sets out to tell the story of the story – and it’s just as fascinating. Greenblatt canters through millennia of human history with ease

With all his usual clarity and freshness, one of our foremost literary historians and critics sets out a comprehensive picture of how a story foundational for European civilization developed, from its origins in western Asia to its much-contested place in the post-Darwinian world… This is a rich, learned, lively book, which should engage all who are interested in the history of our imagination and the interweavings of faith, poetics, and philosophy.

Rowan Williams, former Archbishop of Canterbury

Vibrant and accessible… It is a fascinating subject, and Greenblatt brings to it all the skill of his distinguished career as a scholar and cultural interpreter. His narrative moves briskly from one (arguably) historically pivotal moment to the next. His reading of Milton, whom he greatly admires, is especially illuminating. The whole book is lit up with flashes of insight… This is a very engaging book which explores a rich seam in European history and culture… Well worth reading

Human beings have always told stories about who we are and where we came from … In this enchanting book, Stephen Greenblatt puts this ancient story into historical, literary, and artistic context, helping to illuminate how we humans have chosen to think about ourselves.

Sean Carroll, New York Times bestselling author of THE BIG PICTURE

While some of the conclusions are provocative, that’s always half the fun with Greenblatt.

[A] wonderfully readable account of the most potent of all myths

A fascinating book, which throws light on a good many dark corners about what we think we know

Stephen Greenblatt is Cogan University Professor of the Humanities at Harvard University. 
 
He is the author of fifteen books, including The Swerve: How the World Became Modern, which won the National Book Award and a Pulitzer Prize, as well as the New York Times bestseller Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare and the classic university text Renaissance Self-Fashioning. 
 
 A prize-winning author and celebrated scholar, he has been studying, thinking and writing about Renaissance literature for his entire working life.

Selected as a book of the year 2017 by The Times and Sunday Times 
 
What is it about Adam and Eve’s story that fascinates us? What does it tell us about how our species lives, dies, works or has sex? 
 
The mythic tale of Adam and Eve has shaped conceptions of human origins and destiny for centuries. Stemming from a few verses in an ancient book, it became not just the foundation of three major world faiths, but has evolved through art, philosophy and science to serve as the mirror in which we seem to glimpse the whole, long history of our fears and desires. 
 
In a quest that begins at the dawn of time, Stephen Greenblatt takes us from ancient Babylonia to the forests of east Africa. We meet evolutionary biologists and fossilised ancestors; we grapple with morality and marriage in Milton’s Paradise Lost; and we decide if the Fall is the unvarnished truth or fictional allegory.

How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare

Will In The World

The fullest and most brilliant account ever written of Shakespeare's life, his work and his age - now reissued with a 400th anniversary afterword

A vast shelf of biographies of the Bard exists, but this is the book I would take with me to a desert island

A work of wonderful erudition that can be read as an accessible introduction to the social and political milieu from which Shakespeare emerged, and as an elegant guide to the astonishing poems and plays themselves

Both insightful literary criticism and a gripping piece of psychological detective work … Stephen Greenblatt has few equals as a Shakespeare scholar

A delight, full of new insights and infused with a rich understanding of precisely why Shakespeare’s writing gives us such lasting pleasure … quite superb

Thought-provoking … full of unexpected touches … beautifully written

Really gives a sense of being in touch with the man. Greenblatt’s knowledge of the plays and the times in which they were written is so encyclopaedic that he can assemble a convincing portrait of Shakespeare without resorting to smoke and mirrors

The most complexly intelligent and sophisticated, and yet the most keenly enthusiastic, study of the life and work taken together that I have ever read

One of the finest recent Shakespeare biographies

Greenblatt’s fantastically readable biography of our greatest writer paints a riveting portrait of Elizabethan England

Compulsively readable and deeply imaginative

At last, the book Shakespeare has deserved: a brilliant book written by a virtual eyewitness who understands how a playwright takes the stuff of his life and his world and makes it into theatre

A tour de force … a book for artists and ordinary people as well as scholars and students

Stephen Greenblatt's Will in the World is widely recognised to be the fullest and most brilliant account ever written of Shakespeare's life, his work and his age. 
 
Shakespeare was a man of his time, constantly engaging with his audience's deepest desires and fears, and by reconnecting with this historic reality we are able to experience the true character of the playwright himself. Greenblatt traces Shakespeare's unfolding imaginative generosity - his ability to inhabit others, to confer upon them his own strength of spirit, to make them truly live as independent beings as no other artist has ever done. 
 
Digging deep into the vital links between the playwright and his world, Will in the World provides the fullest account ever written of the living, breathing man behind the masterpieces.

How the Renaissance Began

The Swerve

A riveting, exemplary tale of the great cultural &quot;swerve&quot; known as the Renaissance.

A riveting, exemplary tale of the great cultural &quot;swerve&quot; known as the Renaissance. 
 
WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE FOR NON-FICTION 2012 
 
Almost six hundred years ago, a short, genial man took a very old manuscript off a library shelf. With excitement, he saw what he had discovered and ordered it copied. The book was a miraculously surviving copy of an ancient Roman philosophical epic, On the Nature of Things by Lucretius and it changed the course of history. 
 
He found a beautiful poem of the most dangerous ideas &ndash; that the universe functioned without the aid of gods, that religious fear was damaging to human life, and that matter was made up of very small particles in eternal motion. These ideas fuelled the Renaissance, inspiring Botticelli, shaping the thoughts of Montaigne, Darwin, and Einstein. 
 
An innovative work of history by one of the world&rsquo;s most celebrated scholars and a thrilling story of discovery, The Swerve details how one manuscript, plucked from a thousand years of neglect, made possible the world as we know it. 
 
&lsquo;Superbly readable... An exciting story, and Greenblatt tells it with his customary clarity and verve&rsquo; Robert Douglas-Fairhurst, Daily Telegraph

Superbly readable... An exciting story, and Greenblatt tells it with his customary clarity and verve

Superb history ... this concise, learned and fluently written book tells a remarkable story

In this outstandingly constructed assessment of the birth of philosophical modernity, renowned Shakespeare scholar Greenblatt deftly transports reader to the dawn of the Renaissance...Readers from across the humanities will find this enthralling account irresistible

More wonderfully illuminating Renaissance history from a master scholar and historian (starred review)

In this gloriously learned page-turner, both biography and intellectual history, Harvard Shakespearean scholar Greenblatt turns his attention to the front end of the Renaissance as the origin of Western culture's foundation: the free questioning of truth (starred review)

The Dangerous Times and Fatal Genius of Shakespeare’s Greatest Rival, Christopher Marlowe

Dark Renaissance

Poor boy. Dark star. Spy. Transgressor. Genius. 
 
The Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Will in the World reveals the daring and subversive life of Christopher Marlowe – Shakespeare’s contemporary, inspiration, and rival. 
 
’A rigorous and sparkling exploration of what makes an artist …. Essential and addictive reading’ MAGGIE O'FARRELL 
 
In brutally repressive Elizabethan England, artists are frightened into dull conventionality; foreigners are suspect; popular entertainment largely consists of coarse spectacles, animal fights, and hangings. Into this crude world comes an ambitious cobbler’s son from Canterbury with an uncanny ear for Latin poetry – a torment for most schoolboys, yet for a few, a secret portal to beauty, visionary imagination, transgressive desire, and dangerous scepticism. 
 
What Christopher Marlowe finds on the other side of that door, and what he does with it, brings about a spectacular explosion of English literature, language, and culture, enabling the success of his collaborator and rival, William Shakespeare. 
 
With propulsive narrative flair and brilliant literary criticism, Stephen Greenblatt reconstructs the youthful involvement with the queen’s spy service that shaped Marlowe’s brief, troubling life and gave us his Tamburlaine and Faustus – dramatic masterpieces on power and its costs. And with detailed historical insight, Greenblatt explores how the people Marlowe knew, and the transformations they wrought, birthed the economic, scientific, and cultural power of the modern world – involving Faustian bargains with which we reckon still.

A rigorous and sparkling exploration of what makes an artist, Dark Renaissance conjures the Elizabethan age as a place of instability, succession anxiety, and burgeoning theatrical genius. Essential and addictive reading: Greenblatt's Kit Marlowe leaps from the page with all the élan and immediacy of his plays

This brilliant and riveting book brings Christopher Marlowe out of the shadows, capturing the remarkable and sudden life (and the no less sudden and violent death) of this extraordinary Elizabethan poet and playwright. No critic has done more than Stephen Greenblatt to illuminate Marlowe’s world and work. Dark Renaissance is a worthy successor and companion to Will in the World

James Shapiro, author of 1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare

A thrilling portrait of the English theatre’s great transgressor. Stephen Greenblatt gives brilliant life to Marlowe's vaunting intellect, his reckless sexuality, his double-dealing with the security services and above all his theatrical imagination, which exploded out of nowhere to transform the Elizabethan stage

Stephen Greenblatt is Cogan University Professor of the Humanities at Harvard University. 
 
He is the author of fifteen books, including The Swerve: How the World Became Modern, which won the National Book Award and a Pulitzer Prize, as well as the New York Times bestseller Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare and the classic university text Renaissance Self-Fashioning. 
 
A prize-winning author and celebrated scholar, he has been studying, thinking and writing about Renaissance literature for his entire working life.

Poor boy. Dark star. Spy. Transgressor. Genius. 
 
The Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Will in the World reveals the daring and subversive life of Christopher Marlowe – Shakespeare’s contemporary, inspiration, and rival. 
 
In brutally repressive Elizabethan England, artists are frightened into dull conventionality; foreigners are suspect; popular entertainment largely consists of coarse spectacles, animal fights, and hangings. Into this crude world comes an ambitious cobbler’s son from Canterbury with an uncanny ear for Latin poetry – a torment for most schoolboys, yet for a few, a secret portal to beauty, visionary imagination, transgressive desire, and dangerous scepticism. 
 
What Christopher Marlowe finds on the other side of that door, and what he does with it, brings about a spectacular explosion of English literature, language, and culture, enabling the success of his collaborator and rival, William Shakespeare. 
 
With propulsive narrative flair and brilliant literary criticism, Stephen Greenblatt reconstructs the youthful involvement with the queen’s spy service that shaped Marlowe’s brief, troubling life and gave us his Tamburlaine and Faustus – dramatic masterpieces on power and its costs. And with detailed historical insight, Greenblatt explores how the people Marlowe knew, and the transformations they wrought, birthed the economic, scientific, and cultural power of the modern world – involving Faustian bargains with which we reckon still.

Stephen Greenblatt

In this brilliant, beautifully organized, exceedingly readable study of Shakespeare’s tyrants and their tyrannies—their dreadful narcissistic follies, their usurpations and their craziness and their cruelties, their arrogant incompetence, their paranoid viciousness, their falsehoods and their flattery hunger—Stephen Greenblatt manages to elucidate obliquely our own desperate (in Shakespeare’s words) “general woe”.

A scintillating book, uncannily illuminating about current politics, as perceptive about the victims of tyranny as it is about the tyrants themselves.

Nicholas Hytner, former Artistic Director of the Royal National Theatre

[Tyrant] illuminates our present political situation by analysing the traits of Shakespearean tyrants – and their mobs … nimble and intriguing … The 45th president is not mentioned anywhere by name in Tyrant , but the analogies are clear … illuminating.

Ardent and involving ... Greenblatt's points are well made and the implicit parallels are easily drawn ... acutely observed.

Brilliant ... [a] spikily insightful book

A brilliant, vivid, incisive, resonant account of Shakespeare's analysis of politics, and the corruption and abuses of power. He does not need to make contemporary parallels, they are so evidently before us.

Greg Doran, Artistic Director of the Royal Shakespeare Company

TYRANT is a striking literary feat. At the outset, the book notes how Shakespeare craftily commented on his own times by telling tales of tyrants from centuries before. In an act of scholarly daring, Greenblatt then proceeds to do exactly the same thing. Rarely have these blood-soaked creatures seemed so recognizably human and so contemporary.

Greenblatt, as ever, writes elegantly and well.

[T]his is not just a book about the perverse psychology of megalomanics, it also describes the social ambience in which they move like sharks in a sea brimming with smaller fish – the enablers

Never less than illuminating… In Tyrant, Greenblatt demonstrates the enduring relevance of Shakespeare’s outlook

Greenblatt illuminatingly… offer[s] new understandings not just of the plays but also of the workings of power itself

A highly entertaining rhetorical exercise tinged with sinister intimations of dread

Tyrant is exceedingly relevant as a lens on US politics and social science research and makes a useful case, too, for incorporating interdisciplinary understanding of societies and governing systems

Shakespeare On Power

'Brilliant' Sunday Times 
 
How does a truly disastrous leader – a sociopath, a demagogue, a tyrant – come to power? How, and why, does a tyrant hold on to power? And what goes on in the hidden recesses of the tyrant's soul? 
 
For help in understanding our most urgent contemporary dilemmas, William Shakespeare has no peer. 
 
'Brilliant, timely' Margaret Atwood, on Twitter 
 
'A scintillating book, uncannily illuminating about current politics, as perceptive about the victims of tyranny as it is about the tyrants themselves' Nicholas Hytner

Stephen Greenblatt

Praise for Tyrant

In this brilliant, beautifully organized, exceedingly readable study of Shakespeare’s tyrants and their tyrannies—their dreadful narcissistic follies, their usurpations and their craziness and their cruelties ...

Brilliant, timely

A scintillating book, uncannily illuminating about current politics, as perceptive about the victims of tyranny as it is about the tyrants themselves.

In this brilliant, beautifully organized, exceedingly readable study of Shakespeare’s tyrants and their tyrannies—their dreadful narcissistic follies, their usurpations and their craziness and their cruelties ...

Brilliant, timely

A scintillating book, uncannily illuminating about current politics, as perceptive about the victims of tyranny as it is about the tyrants themselves.

In this brilliant, beautifully organized, exceedingly readable study of Shakespeare’s tyrants and their tyrannies—their dreadful narcissistic follies, their usurpations and their craziness and their cruelties ...

Brilliant, timely

A scintillating book, uncannily illuminating about current politics, as perceptive about the victims of tyranny as it is about the tyrants themselves.

Books by Stephen Greenblatt

Articles featuring Stephen Greenblatt

6 books about truth and freedom of speech

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