Showing results by publisher "Canongate Books" in History & Philosophy

In Traversal, Maria Popova traverses the border between life and death, chance and choice, chemistry and consciousness: what makes a body a person? Popova illuminates our various instruments of reckoning with these questions - our telescopes and our treatises, our postulates and our poems - through the intertwined lives, loves and legacies of visionaries both celebrated and sidelined by history, people born into the margins of their time and place who lived to write the future: Mary Shelley, Walt Whitman, Frederick Douglass, Fanny Wright.

We feel that the present is everything; all we can know. Yet physics finds no universal ’now’. To explore what a moment really is, In Search of Now draws on state-of-the-art discoveries in neuroscience, psychology, cosmology and quantum physics, revealing a dynamic, creative process in which we all play a part.

We love to believe in a meritocracy of ideas - that genius is always recognised, innovation always seized upon and rewarded. Yet so many of the people we now recognise as the world's great creators initially got little traction for their work. It faded out, and it was only later, often much...