Peter Watson

Peter Watson, el gran historiador intelectual del siglo XX, nos muestra cómo surgió, y cómo fue desechada por los científicos, la idea de construir un arma nuclear y cómo un pequeño grupo de conspiradores, asentados en el poder, tomo por su cuenta, tal como lo revelan los documentos desclasificados en estos ultimos años, la decision de construir y emplear la bomba atomica, que nadie queria realmente y que no era necesaria, contra lo que se dice, para acabar la segunda guerra mundial. El libro de Watson, escrito con su habitual garra narrativa, no solo desvela un pasado desconocido sino que ilumina un presente sujeto todavia a la amenaza nuclear.

Uno de los más destacados historiadores británicos nos ofrece aquí el palpitante relato de uno de los planteamientos intelectuales más relevantes y controvertidos del mundo moderno: el ateísmoPeter Watson, autor de dos grandes obras como son Ideas y Una historia intelectual del siglo XX, completa ahora este panorama con una nueva e importante dimension: un analisis de como ha evolucionado el mundo de las creencias y los valores desde que en 1882 Nietzsche proclamo lamuerte de Dios. Basandose en su extraordinario conocimiento del pensamiento, la literatura y el arte, Watson nos conduce en un fascinante recorrido por ciento treinta años de historia intelectual, en el que no solo explora la aportacion individual de artistas, cientificos, filosofos y pensadores, sino que explora fenomenos colectivos como el auge del ocultismo en visperas de la primera guerra mundial, elateismo cientificoen la Rusia sovietica, lasreligiones de la sangrede la Alemania nazi, la difusion de la psicodelia en los años sesenta o la violencia religiosa de nuestros dias. Quienes se apasionaron con Una historia intelectual del siglo XX volveran a encontrar aqui al mejor Watson.

Cuando Colón llegó a América en 1492 encontró un Nuevo Mundo muy distinto del Viejo, del cual había partido. ¿Por qué habían evolucionado de manera tan distinta? Para averiguarlo Watson emprende una experiencia de arqueologia cognitiva, basada en la interaccion que existe entre las ideas de los seres humanos y las realidades naturales de su entorno, con el fin de ofrecernos una vision comparada de la evolucion de las civilizaciones, las creencias y las formas de vida en Eurasia y en America. Basandose en los mas recientes hallazgos de la arqueologia y de la ciencia, Watson nos guia por un fantastico recorrido en que nos habla de genes y volcanes, de la relacion entre los humanos y los animales, del culto de la Gran Diosa, del Genesis y la prehistoria del sexo, de drogas, sacrificios y plegariasDe las diferencias, en suma, entre un mundo creado por los pastores y otro dominado por los chamanes.

A compulsively readable blend of romance and drama based on actual events in Britain and France leading up to D-Day in 1944 Matthew Hammond is a British military officer posted to the European theater during World War II. He sustained a serious injury on the front lines, so bad, in fact, that it cost him a lung. Now he is back in England, unable to fight, but he continues to serve his country by training new resistance fighters. One of the recruits under his tutelage is Madeleine, a spellbinding, impassioned French-Canadian with eyes of "burnished whiskey." Despite protocols discouraging romance, they are deeply in love, and Matthew is torn about putting Madeleine's life in danger. He already has one tragic affair with a Resistance fighter under his belt his former lover, Celestine, was killed because her assassination of a German doctor went awry. But the Allies are mustering all their resources for crucial beach landings in Normandy, and Matthew knows his unit will need to play a role. It will be a very dangerous mission: parachuting in behind the Nazi line. As Madeleine progresses through the training with her fellow recruits, Matthew can only hope that luck will guide her through when the drop finally arrives."

Es difícil calificar un libro que nos ofrece nada menos que el patrimonio intelectual de la humanidad. No se encontrará en sus páginas la majestad de los reyes, o el fragor de las batallas, sino la belleza de las intuiciones, las ideas y las invenciones que, desde la noche de los tiempos, ha desarrollado el hombre para mejorar su condicion y su vida. Peter Watson, autor de la celebrada Historia intelectual del siglo XX, se remonta a casi tres millones de años atras, con la invencion del hacha de silex, para explorar los primeros lenguajes, el nacimiento de los dioses, el origen del arte, la filosofia y la ciencia, o las profundas consecuencias de la creacion del dinero. Describe la aparicion de la escritura, las ideas de justicia y derecho o la nocion del alma, y explica como se concibieron los numeros, como se inventaron la rueda, el papel, la brujula, la imprenta o el telegrafo, como surgieron la filosofia y la ciencia, la medicina, la economia y el capitalismo. El autor estudia las conexiones en el tiempo y en el espacio de las ideas de filosofos, juristas, lideres religiosos, descubridores, inventores, creadores y pensadores, desde el Gilgamesh hasta Sigmund Freud, e identifica las tres ideas que, en su opinion, mas han influido en la historia de la humanidad: el alma, la invencion de Europa y el metodo cientifico. Todo esta en este libro, desde la conquista del fuego hasta la tecnologia punta de nuestros dias. Pero tambien la conciencia de que el progreso no ha sido constante en el tiempo ni ha afectado -ni afecta- por igual a toda la humanidad. Con razon nos dice Watson que la vida intelectual, que es la dimension mas importante y satisfactoria de nuestra existencia, es cosa fragil, que se quiebra o destruye con gran facilidad. Por eso este libro, que John Gray ha calificado de "obra maestra de la historiografia", plantea tantas preguntas. Y trata de responder a ellas.

From the end of the Baroque age and the death of Bach in 1750 to the rise of Hitler in 1933, Germany was transformed from a poor relation among western nations into a dominant intellectual and cultural force more influential than France, Britain, Italy, Holland, and the United States. In the early decades of the 20th century, German artists, writers, philosophers, scientists, and engineers were leading their freshly-unified country to new and undreamed of heights, and by 1933, they had won more Nobel prizes than anyone else and more than the British and Americans combined. But this genius was cut down in its prime with the rise and subsequent fall of Adolf Hitler and his fascist Third Reich-a legacy of evil that has overshadowed the nations contributions ever since. Yet how did the Germans achieve their pre-eminence beginning in the mid-18th century? In this fascinating cultural history, Peter Watson goes back through time to explore the origins of the German genius, how it flourished and shaped our lives, and, most importantly, to reveal how it continues to shape our world. As he convincingly demonstarates, while we may hold other European cultures in higher esteem, it was German thinking-from Bach to Nietzsche to Freud-that actually shaped modern America and Britain in ways that resonate today.

Convergence is a history of modern science with an original and significant twist. Various scientific disciplines, despite their very different beginnings, and disparate areas of interest have been coming together over the past 150 years, converging and coalescing, to identify one extraordinary master narrative, one overwhelming interlocking coherent story: the history of the universe. Intimate connections between physics and chemistry have been revealed as have the links between quantum chemistry and molecular biology. Astronomy has been augmented by particle physics, psychology has been increasingly aligned with physics, with chemistry and even with economics. Genetics has been harmonised with linguistics, botany with archaeology, climatology with myth. This is a simple insight but one with profound consequences. Convergence is, as Nobel Prize-winning physicist Steven Weinberg has put it, The deepest thing about the universe. This book does not, however, tell the story by beginning at the beginning and ending at the end. It is much more revealing, more convincing, and altogether more thrilling to tell the story as it emerged, as it began to fall into place, piece by piece, converging tentatively at first, but then with increasing speed, vigour and confidence. The overlaps and interdependence of the sciences, the emerging order that they are gradually uncovering, is without question the most enthralling aspect of twenty-first-century science.

A diferencia de historias más convencionales donde la atención se fija en eventos y personajes políticos, en guerras, tratados y elecciones, este libro se concentra en las ideas que hicieron de este siglo algo tan rico, valioso y provocativo. Empezando con cuatro innovaciones fundamentales que se introdujeron en el 1900 -el incosnciente, el gen, el cuanto y las primeras pinturas de Picasso en Paris- el libro reune las principales areas de conocimiento y yuxtapone las mas originales e influyentes ideas de nuestro tiempo en una narrativa extraordinariamente amena. Una verdadera historia intelectual del siglo XX

Between December 1943 and August 1944, Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Winston Churchill ignited the Cold War, a superpower rivalry that would dominate the world over half a century, by building an atomic bomb and excluding their Russian allies. Peter Watson tells the pulse-pounding story of how two atomic physicists tried to counter this in two very different ways. While Niels Bohr sought to convince President Roosevelt and Prime Minister Churchill to share their nuclear knowledge with Joseph Stalin, nuclear scientist Klaus Fuchs, a German Communist emigre to Britain, was leaking atomic secrets to the Soviets in a rival attempt to ensure parity between the superpowers. Neither succeeded in preventing the World War II allies from unleashing the atom bomb on the world.Fallout proves that the atomic bomb was not needed, and was made as a result of a series of flawed decisions. The Americans did not tell the UK that the atomic research was compromised by Soviet spies; the British did not tell the Americans that in 1943 they knew for sure that Germany did not have a nuclear bomb program. Neither country admitted to the scientists developing the bomb that it would never be used to counter the (non-existent) German nuclear threat. Had the scientists known, many of them would have refused to complete work on the bomb. This story shows how politicians fatally failed to understand the nature of atomic science and, in so doing, exposed the world needlessly to great danger, a danger that is still very much with us.

Terrible Beauty presents a unique narrative of the twentieth century. Unlike more conventional histories, where the focus is on political events and personalities, on wars, treaties and elections, this book concentrates on the ideas that made the century so rich, rewarding and provocative. Beginning with four seminal ideas which were introduced in 1900 - the unconscious, the gene, the quantum and Picasso''s first paintings in Paris - the book brings together the main areas of thought and juxtaposes the most original and influential ideas of our time in an immensely readable narrative. From the creation of plastic to Norman Mailer, from the discovery of the ''Big Bang'' to the Counterculture, from Relativity to Susan Sontag, from Proust to Salman Rushdie, and Henri Bergson to Saul Bellow, the book''s range is encyclopedic. We meet in these pages the other twentieth century, the writers, the artists, the scientists and philosophers who were not cowed by the political and military disasters raging around them, and produced some of the most amazing and rewarding ideas by which we live. Terrible Beauty, endlessly stimulating and provocative, affirms that there was much more to the twentieth century than war and genocide.

Paisaje con mentiras, es un cuadro herencia del siglo XVI de la familia de Isobel Sadler y muestra nueve extrañas figuras sobre un paisaje. Para Michael Whiting, propietario de una galería de arte, el valor artístico de la pintura es nulo pero tentado por la curiosidad, empieza a realizar algunas investigaciones. Y lo que descubre es asombroso: ese cuadro sin interés aparente resulta ser algo parecido al mapa de un tesoro.

Es difícil calificar un libro que nos ofrece nada menos que el patrimonio intelectual de la humanidad. No se encontrará en sus páginas la majestad de los reyes, o el fragor de las batallas, sino la belleza de las intuiciones, las ideas y las invenciones que, desde la noche de los tiempos, ha desarrollado el hombre para mejorar su condicion y su vida.;Peter Watson -autor de la celebrada Historia intelectual del siglo XX- se remonta a casi tres millones de años atras, con la invencion del hacha de silex, para explorar los primeros lenguajes, el nacimiento de los dioses, el origen del arte, la filosofia y la ciencia, o las profundas consecuencias de la creacion del dinero. Describe la aparicion de la escritura, las ideas de justicia y derecho o la nocion del alma, y explica como se concibieron los numeros, como se inventaron la rueda, el papel, la brujula, la imprenta o el telegrafo, como surgieron la filosofia y la ciencia, la medicina, la economia y el capitalismo. El autor estudia las conexiones en el tiempo y en el espacio.

From the acclaimed author of The German Genius and The French Mind a masterful journey through 500 years of British history The reign of Queen Elizabeth I ushered in an unprecedented age of exploration and discovery It saw an island nation hitherto a cultural backwater begin for the first time to occupy a realm of innovation and imagination that had for centuries been the domain of China India and the Arab nations of the Middle East With England s gathering greatness asserted by a swashbuckling generation of merchant warriors and adventurers and with the epic voyages of Magellan Columbus Vasco da Gama and Francis Drake charting the great beyond it became clear that a fortuitous position on the edges of Europe and the Atlantic offered ever wider imaginative horizons Indeed what came next is described by historian Peter Watson as the greatest expansion of ideas and knowledge the world has ever seen The British Imagination is a lively and deeply researched history that encompasses the five centuries that formed the contemporary mindset from Francis Bacon and the first Spectator to Mary Wollstonecraft Elizabeth Barrett Browning James Clerk Maxwell and Maynard Keynes from the Royal Society to the industrial revolution and from the first New World lan

The justification for the atomic bomb was simple: it would defeat Hitler and end the Second World War faster, saving lives. The reality was different.Fallout dismantles the conventional story of why the atom bomb was built. Peter Watson has found new documents showing that long before the Allied bomb was operational, it was clear that Germany had no atomic weapons of its own and was not likely to. The British knew this, but didnt share their knowledge with the Americans, who in turn deceived the British about the extent to which the Soviets had penetrated their plans to build and deploy the bomb. The dark secret was that the bomb was dropped not to decisively end the war in the Pacific but to warn off Stalins Russia, still in principle a military ally of the US and Britain. It did not bring a hot war to an abrupt end; instead it set up the terms for a Cold one to begin. Moreover, none of the scientists recruited to build the bomb had any idea that the purpose of the bomb had been secretly changed and that Russian deterrence was its new objective.Fallout vividly reveals the story of the unnecessary building of the atomic bomb, the most destructive weapon in the world, and the long-term consequences that are still playing out to this day.

From Freud to Babbitt, from Animal Farm to Sartre to the Great Society, from the Theory of Relativity to counterculture to Kosovo, The Modern Mind is encyclopedic, covering the major writers, artists, scientists, and philosophers who produced the ideas by which we live. Peter Watson has produced a fluent and engaging narrative of the intellectual tradition of the twentieth century, and the men and women who created it.

A highly ambitious and lucid history of ideas from the very earliest times to the present day.A masterpieceNEW STATESMANAn extraordinary new book ... This is the history of "ideas" as it has never presented before SUNDAY TELEGRAPHIn this hugely ambitious and exciting book Peter Watson tells the history of ideas from prehistory to the present day, leading to a new way of telling the history of the world. The book begins over a million years ago with a discussion of how the earliest ideas might have originated. Looking at animal behaviour that appears to require some thought: tool-making, territoriality, counting, language (or at least sounds), pairbonding. Peter Watson moves on to the apeman and the development of simple ideas such as cooking, the earliest language, the emergence of family life. All the obvious areas are tackled: the Ancient Greeks, Christian theology, the ideas of Jesus, astrological thought, the soul, the self, beliefs about the heavens, the ideas of Islam, the Crusades, humanism, the Renaissance, Gutenberg and the book, the scientific revolution, the age of discovery, Shakespeare, the idea of Revolution, the Romantic imagination, Darwin, imperialism, modernism, Freud right up to the present day and the internet.