Jonathan Rée

During the 1790s the little town of Jena, in Saxony, blossomed into colourful activity. With active support from Goethe, ducal minister in nearby Weimar, the ancient university cast off its reputation for beery rowdiness and intellectual torpor. Schiller was given a post there in 1789, and Fichte in 1794, and their passionate lectures – delivered in German rather than the customary...

In October 1951 one of the biggest celebrities of British radio entertainment went missing in the course of a railway journey from London to Leeds. His disappearance coincided with Labour’s defeat in the general election, and to many people it came as an even greater shock. He had been doing his cheeky-boy routines on the wireless since 1944, and for the past two years had been starring...

You might have expected the idea of Enlightenment to have gone out of fashion by now. Indeed you might have expected the entire pack of tacky Victorian labels for cultural periods – the Middle Ages, Renaissance, Romanticism, Modernity and so on – to have fallen into disuse long ago. They seem to belong to a world we have lost, where the whole of history was a brief, memorable tale...

Descartes’s Meditations tells the story of six days in the life of a rather self-important, busy young man who has granted himself a short sabbatical. Quite a few years have passed, he says, since he decided to take this meditative mini-break, and now at last he has cleared a whole week to spend in an isolated house with only his thoughts and memories for company. He is planning to...

Antonio Damasio’s two previous books, Descartes’s Error and The Feeling of What Happens, appealed not only to scientists. The citations, prizes and honours, not to mention the author’s photograph, reveal that Damasio, one of the world’s leading neuroscientists, is also a person of deep sensitivity and broad cosmopolitan culture. Readers in search of a Renaissance man...