Memory

Description

A packed, provocative anthology on a subject close to us all, with analyses of memory (and forgetting) ranging from childhood recollections to the latest neuroscience, Plato to Freud, medieval poets to London taxi drivers. This fascinating anthology introduces us to a wide range of arguments on the subject of memory, the thread that holds our lives, and our history, together. Arranged in themed sections, the book includes specially commissioned essays by the editors and by writers with expertise in different fields - from 'Memory and Evolution' by Patrick Bateson to 'Memory and Forgetting' by the biographer Richard Holmes, and an account of the chemistry of the brain by Steven Rose. Complementing the essays are a rich selection of extracts from writers and thinkers such as Plato and Aristotle, Montaigne and Shakespeare, Wordsworth and Proust, Jorge Luis Borges and Haruki Murakami. Stimulating, provocative, funny or profoundly moving, Memory is a book to treasure - and remember.

Harriet Harvey Wood is the former Head of Literature at the British Council. A.S. Byatt is internationally acclaimed as a novelist, short story-writer and critic. Her books include Possession (winner of the Booker Prize in 1990), and the quartet of The Virgin in the Garden, Still Life, Babel Tower and A Whistling Woman. Educated at York and Newnham College, Cambridge, she taught at the Central School of Art and Design, and was Senior Lecturer in English at University College, London, before becoming a full-time writer in 1983. She was appointed CBE in 1990 and DBE in 1999.

A book for the magpies among us, designed to be dipped in to time after time ... absorbing anthology * Sunday Herald * The appeal of this scholarly and thoughtful anthology is that it juxtaposes glancing insights with painstaking research... the two introductions... display something of the combined tastes and talents that have gone into this fascinating compilation -- Penelope Lively * Financial Times * Rich and thought-provoking... What is appealing about this anthology (and I write as someone who on the whole dislikes them) is that it not only gives examples of the myriad responses that memory evokes but it offers theories that try to account for it * The Times * A fascinating and topical encyclopaedia on a little understood subject... a forensic strike at the quivering fragility of what and how we remember * Big Issue * Engaging...constantly surprising * Scotland on Sunday *