The Critical Imagination is a study of metaphor, imaginativeness, and criticism of the arts. Since the eighteenth century, many philosophers have argued that appreciating art is rewarding because it involves responding imaginatively to a work. Literary works can be interpreted in many ways; architecture can be seen as stately, meditative, or forbidding; and sensitive descriptions of art are often colourful metaphors: music can "shimmer," prose can be "perfumed," and a painter's colouring can be "effervescent." Engaging with art, like creating it, seems to offer great scope for imagination. Hume, Kant, Oscar Wilde, Roger Scruton, and others have defended variations on this attractive idea. In this book, James Grant critically examines it. The first half explains the role imaginativeness plays in criticism. To do this, Grant answers three questions that are of interest in their own right. First, what are the aims of criticism? Is the point of criticizing a work to evaluate it, to explain it, to modify our response to it, or something else? Second, what is it to appreciate art? Third, what is imaginativeness? He gives new answers to all three questions, and uses them to explain the role of imaginativeness in criticism. The book's second half focuses on metaphor. Why are some metaphors so effective? How do we understand metaphors? Are some thoughts expressible only in metaphor? Grant's answers to these questions go against much current thinking in the philosophy of language. He uses these answers to explain why imaginative metaphors are so common in art criticism. The result is a rigorous and original theory of metaphor, criticism, imaginativeness, and their interrelations.

The Critical Imagination (Oxford Philosophical Monographs)

Literature & Fiction

Grant, James

History & Criticism

Oxford University Press

Cassell's Old and new Edinburgh: Its History, Its People, and Its Places; Volume 1

History

Franklin Classics

John Adams: Party of One

An acute examination of a paradoxical U.S. president. John Adams was an undiplomatic diplomat and an impolitic politician--a fierce revolutionary yet a detached and reluctant leader of the nation he helped to found. Few American public figures have ever been more devoted to doing the right thing, or more contemptuous of doing the merely popular thing. Yet his Yankee-bred fixation with ethical propriety and fiscal conservatism never stood in the way of his doing what was necessary. Adams hated debt, but as minister to the Netherlands during the Revolution, he was America's premier junk-bond salesman. And though raised a traditional Massachusetts Congregationalist, Adams was instrumental in bringing about the consecration of the first American Episcopal bishops. He was a warm and magnanimous friend and, on occasion, a man who fully vindicated the famous judgment of a rival he detested. Adams, said Benjamin Franklin, "means well for his country, is always an honest man, often a wise one, but, sometimes, and in some things, is absolutely out of his senses." James Grant examines this complex and often contradictory founding father in the most well-rounded and multi-faceted portrait of Adams to date. Going from his beginnings on a hardscrabble Massachusetts farm to the Continental Congress to the Court of St. James and the White House, Grant traces the words and deeds of one of our most learned but politically star-crossed leaders.

Biographies & Memoirs

Leaders & Notable People

Farrar. Straus and Giroux

Essays reprinted from "Grant's Interest Rate Observer" explore developments in the world of finance during the past ten years

Minding Mr. Market: Ten Years on Wall Street With Grant's Interest Rate Observer

Business & Money

Economics

Farrar. Straus & Giroux

A look at America's relationship with debt describes how American industrial and financial communities' speculative frenzy in the 1980s has brought about today's weak economy.

Money of the Mind: Borrowing and Lending in America from the Civil War to Michael Milken

Finance

The 1980s witnessed a lemming-like rush into the sea of debt on the part of the American industrial and financial communities, with consequences we are only beginning to appreciate. But the speculative frenzy of the eighties didn't just happen. It was the culmination of a long cycle of slow relaxation of credit practices--the subject of James Grant's brilliant, clear-eyed history of American finance. Two long-running trends converged in the 1980s to create one of our greatest speculative booms: the democratization of credit and the socialization of risk. At the turn of the century, it was almost impossible for the average working person to get a loan. In the 1980s, it was almost impossible to refuse one. As the pace of lending grew, the government undertook to bear more and more of the creditors' risk--a pattern, begun in the Progressive era, which reached full flower in the "conservative" administration of Ronald Reagan. Based on original scholarship as well as firsthand observation, Grant's book puts our recent love affair with debt in an entirely fresh, often chilling, perspective. The result is required--and wickedly entertaining--reading for everyone who wants or needs to understand how the world really works. "A brilliantly eccentric, kaleidoscopic tour of our credit lunacy. . . . A splendid, tooth-gnashing saga that should be savored for its ghoulish humor and passionately debated for its iconoclastic analysis. It is a fitting epitaph to the credit binge of the '80s."--Ron Chernow, The Wall Street Journal.

Money of the Mind: How the 1980s Got That Way

Biography & History

An acute examination of a paradoxical U.S. president. John Adams was an undiplomatic diplomat and an impolitic politician--a fierce revolutionary yet a detached and reluctant leader of the nation he helped to found. Few American public figures have ever been more devoted to doing the right thing, or more contemptuous of doing the merely popular thing. Yet his Yankee-bred fixation with ethical propriety and fiscal conservatism never stood in the way of his doing what was necessary. Adams hated debt, but as minister to the Netherlands during the Revolution, he was America's premier junk-bond salesman. And though raised a traditional Massachusetts Congregationalist, Adams was instrumental in bringing about the consecration of the first American Episcopal bishops. He was a warm and magnanimous friend and, on occasion, a man who fully vindicated the famous judgment of a rival he detested. Adams, said Benjamin Franklin, "means well for his country, is always an honest man, often a wise one, but, sometimes, and in some things, is absolutely out of his senses." James Grant examines this complex and often contradictory founding father in the most well-rounded and multi-faceted portrait of Adams to date. Going from his beginnings on a hardscrabble Massachusetts farm to the Continental Congress to the Court of St. James and the White House, Grant traces the words and deeds of one of our most learned but politically star-crossed leaders.

Historical

Review\n"A gem of a book: entertaining, wry, and gloriously eccentric." 
― Sebastian Mallaby, Foreign Affairs\n"Bagehot was a financial journalist with a love of English literature and a facility for clear and cogent prose. So is Mr. Grant.… Bagehot is a terrific and efficient survey of the political and economic disputations of mid-Victorian England." 
― Barton Swaim, The Wall Street Journal\n"Very enjoyable… Grant demonstrates that he has the measure of a fascinating―and great―Victorian." 
― John Plender, Financial Times\n"Lively.… Entertaining." 
― John Lanchester, The New Yorker\n"James Grant [is] one of the most influential contemporary commentators on Wall Street.… In Grant’s hands, Bagehot’s life and career provide a superb prism through which to observe the extraordinary revolution in the British economy during the 19th century." 
― Simon Nixon, The Times (London)\n"Excellent." 
― Benjamin Schwarz, The New York Times Book Review\n"The most perceptive and brilliant economic and political writer of his time deserves a biographer of equal literary merit. In James Grant, Walter Bagehot has found him." 
― Mervyn King, former governor of the Bank of England and author of The End of Alchemy\n“Excellent… and written in a gripping style.” ―The Economist 
During the upheavals of 2007–09, the chairman of the Federal Reserve had the name of one Victorian icon on the tip of his tongue: Walter Bagehot. Banker, man of letters, and inventor of the Treasury bill, Bagehot prescribed the doctrines that―decades later―inspired the radical responses to the world’s worst financial crises. Persuasive and precocious, he was also the esteemed editor of the Economist. He offered astute commentary on the financial issues of his day, held sway in political circles, made as many high-profile friends as enemies, and won the admiration of Matthew Arnold and Woodrow Wilson. Drawing on a wealth of historical documents, correspondence, and publications, James Grant paints a vivid portrait of the banker and his world.

Bagehot: The Life and Times of the Greatest Victorian

W.W.Norton&Company

The definitive biography of one of the most brilliant and influential financial minds―banker, essayist, and editor of the Economist.
During the upheavals of 2007–09, the chairman of the Federal Reserve had the name of a Victorian icon on the tip of his tongue: Walter Bagehot. Banker, man of letters, inventor of the Treasury bill, and author of Lombard Street, the still-canonical guide to stopping a run on the banks, Bagehot prescribed the doctrines that―decades later―inspired the radical responses to the world’s worst financial crises.
Born in the small market town of Langport, just after the Panic of 1825 swept across England, Bagehot followed in his father’s footsteps and took a position at the local family bank―but his influence on financial matters would soon spread far beyond the county of Somerset. Persuasive and precocious, he came to hold sway in political circles, making high-profile friends, including William Gladstone―and enemies, such as Lord Overstone and Benjamin Disraeli. As a prolific essayist on wide-ranging topics, Bagehot won the admiration of Matthew Arnold and Woodrow Wilson, and delighted in paradox. He was also a misogynist, and while he opposed slavery, he misjudged Abraham Lincoln and the Civil War. As editor of the Economist, he offered astute commentary on the financial issues of his day, and his name lives on in an eponymous weekly column. He has been called "the Greatest Victorian."
In James Grant’s colorful and groundbreaking biography, Bagehot appears as both an ornament to his own age and a muse to our own. Drawing on a wealth of historical documents, correspondence, and publications, Grant paints a vivid portrait of the banker and his world.

The tartans of 72 Highland clans are presented in full-page, full-color, large-format illustrations. With a new introduction to tartans by J. Charles Thompson, Fellow of the Scottish Tartan Society and a noted authority in the field. A must for costume, textile and fashion designers and historians, and an eye-filling pleasure for all.

Scottish Tartans in Full Color (Dover Pictorial Archive)

Arts & Photography

Graphic Design

Dover Publications

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Grant, James. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Grant, James

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Grant, James. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

The Critical Imagination (Oxford Philosophical Monographs)

Cassell's Old and new Edinburgh: Its History, Its People, and Its Places; Volume 1

John Adams: Party of One

Minding Mr. Market: Ten Years on Wall Street With Grant's Interest Rate Observer

Money of the Mind: Borrowing and Lending in America from the Civil War to Michael Milken

Money of the Mind: How the 1980s Got That Way

John Adams: Party of One

Bagehot: The Life and Times of the Greatest Victorian

Bagehot: The Life and Times of the Greatest Victorian

Scottish Tartans in Full Color (Dover Pictorial Archive)