The story of one of the most revolutionary books in history -- the Encyclopedie and the young men who risked everything to write it. In 1777 a group of young men produced a book that aimed to tear the world apart and rebuild it. It filled 27 volumes and contained 72,000 articles, 16,500 pages and 17 million words. The Encyclopedie was so dangerous and subversive that it was banned by the Pope and was seen as one of the causes of the French Revolution. The writers included some of the greatest minds of the age: Denis Diderot, the editor, who had come to Paris to become a Jesuit but found the joys of the city too enticing; d'Alembert, one of the leading mathematicians of the 18th century; Rousseau, the father of Romanticism and Voltaire, the author of CANDIDE. During the sixteen years it took to write, compile and produce all twenty seven volumes, the writers had to defy the authorities and faced exile, jail and censorship, as well as numerous internal falling outs and philosophical differences. Yet, in the end, they produced a book that would act as a bomb that exploded at the centre of civilisation and changed the world forever.

Encyclopedie

Reference

Philipp Blom

Encyclopedias & Subject Guides

Fourth Estate

The most breathtaking work of history since Paris 1919.Europe, early in the 20th century: a world adrift, a pulsating era of creativity and contradictions. The hot topics of the day — terrorism and globalization, immigration, consumerism, the lack of moral values, and rivaling superpowers — could make one forget that it is a century ago that this era vanished into the trenches of the Somme and Vimy Ridge.Or did it? The closer one looks, the more this world seems like ours, the more one sees that the questions and realities shaping our lives and thoughts were formulated and laid down at the beginning of the 20th century: feminism, democratization, mass communication, commercial branding, consumerism, state-sponsored genocide, and psychoanalysis were all concepts birthed in this period. This was a time radically unlike the Victorian era that preceded it, a time in which all the old certainties broke down. Philipp Blom succeeds in bringing to life the immediacy of the lives and issues of this fascinating, flawed pre-war period.Through a series of historical vignettes, each chapter focusing on one particularly telling event for every year from 1900 to 1914, The Vertigo Years discovers the great people, powers, and ideas of Europe after 1900. The approach is eclectic, brilliantly combining the novelist’s eye with the craft of the historian. It opens up this era in all its contradictions and similarities to our own.From the Hardcover edition.

The Vertigo Years

History

Europe

Basic

Imagine the world's most brilliant and charismatic people around one dinner table, the greatest philosophers, novelists, scientists, actors and political activists - and imagine them joking one moment and then immersed in intense discussion broken by bursts of laughter. Imagine also that this astonishing company was defined not only by who is at the table, but by what they say: opinions radical enough to land them all in prison.The decade-long flourishing, in the 1760s, of friendship and radical philosophy in Baron Holbach's Paris salon is a seminal moment in Western history, a moment of astonishing radicalism in European thought, so uncompromising and bold that its vision has still not be fully realised. Frequented by a group of men and women who were united by their love of intellectual freedom, by their contempt for the conventional and often by the danger of persecution into which they put themselves, Holbach's house became the epicentre of freethinking, a place like no other in eighteenth-century Europe. The guests would talk until deep into the night, dreaming up a bold, new way of doing things, of thinking about the world and about society - a way we have come to call modernity.The book focuses on the early life of four young men, two philosophers (Hume and Rousseau) and two philosophes (Didenot and Holbach) as they set out with a mixture of desperation and optimism to travel and study. Philipp Blom's new book dazzlingly combines biography with the history of ideas and the birth of modernism.

Wicked Company: Radical Freethinkers and Friendship in Pre-Revolutionary Paris

George Weidenfeld & Nicholson

The Simmons Papers

Literature & Fiction

Contemporary

Faber and Faber Ltd.

Fracture: Life and Culture in the West, 1918-1938

ATLANTIC BOOKS *

In this innovative and compelling work of environmental history, Philipp Blom chronicles the great climate crisis of the 1600s, a crisis that would transform the entire social and political fabric of Europe.\nWhile hints of a crisis appeared as early as the 1570s, by the end of the sixteenth century the temperature plummeted so drastically that Mediterranean harbours were covered with ice, birds literally dropped out of the sky, and ‘frost fairs’ were erected on a frozen Thames – with kiosks, taverns, and even brothels that become a semi-permanent part of the city.\nRecounting the deep legacy and sweeping consequences of this ‘Little Ice Age’, acclaimed historian Philipp Blom reveals how the European landscape had ineradicably changed by the mid-seventeenth century. While apocalyptic weather patterns destroyed entire harvests and incited mass migrations, Blom brilliantly shows how they also gave rise to the growth of European cities, the appearance of early capitalism, and the vigorous stirrings of the Enlightenment.\nA sweeping examination of how a society responds to profound and unexpected change, Nature’s Mutiny will transform the way we think about climate change in the twenty-first century and beyond.

Natures Mutiny

Picador

Dazzling recreation of the world of radical free-thinkers in 18th-century FranceFrom the 1750s to the 1770s, the Paris salon of Baron d'Holbach was an epicenter of debate, intellectual daring and revolutionary ideas, uniting around one table vivid personalities from Denis Diderot, Adam Smith, Benjamin Franklin, the radical ex-priest Guillaume Raynal, the Italian Count Beccaria and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who later turned against his friends.It was a moment of astonishing racicalism in European thought, so uncompromising and bold that it was viciously opposed by rival philosophers such as Voltaire and the turncoat Rousseau, and finally suppressed by Robespierre and his Revolutionary henchmen. In Wicked Company, acclaimed historian Philipp Blom retraces the fortunes and characters of this exceptional group of friends and brings to life their startling ideas, largely forgotten by historians. Brilliant minds full of wit, courage and humanity, their thinking created a different and radical French Enlightenment based on atheism, passion, empathy and a compellingly insightful perspective on society. Their ideas force us to confront the debates about our own society and its future with new eyes.

Wicked Company: Freethinkers and Friendship in Pre-Revolutionary Paris

Phoenix

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Books by Philipp Blom