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.

In 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.

In this hugely ambitious and stimulating book, Peter Watson describes the history of ideas, from deep antiquity to the present day, leading to a new way of understanding our world and ourselves. The narrative begins nearly two million years ago with the invention of hand-axes and explores how some of our most cherished notions might have originated before humans had language. Then, in a broad sweep, the book moves forward to consider not the battles and treaties of kings and prime ministers, emperors and generals, but the most important ideas we have evolved, by which we live and which separate us from other animals. Watson explores the first languages and the first words, the birth of the gods, the origins of art, the profound intellectual consequences of money. He describes the invention of writing, early ideas about law, why sacrifice and the soul have proved so enduring in religion. He explains how ideas about time evolved, how numbers were conceived, how science, medicine, sociology, economics, and capitalism came into being. He shows how the discovery of the New World changed forever the way that we think, and why Chinese creativity faded after the Middle Ages. In the course of this commanding narrative, Watson reveals the linkages down the ages in the ideas of many apparently disparate philosophers, astronomers, religious leaders, biologists, inventors, poets, jurists, and scores of others. Aristotle jostles with Aquinas, Ptolemy with Photius, Kalidasa with Zhu Xi, Beethoven with Strindberg, Jefferson with Freud. Ideas is a seminal work.

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.

From the end of the Baroque era and the death of Bach to the rise of Hitler, Germany was transformed from a poor relation among Western nations into a dominant intellectual and cultural force. By 1933, Germans had won more Nobel Prizes than the British and Americans combined. Yet this remarkable genius was cut down in its prime by Adolf Hitler and his disastrous Third Reich—a brutal legacy that has overshadowed the nation’s achievements ever since. In this absorbing cultural and intellectual history, Peter Watson goes back through time to explore the origins of the German genius, explaining how and why it flourished, how it shaped our lives, and, most important, how it continues to influence our world. Watson’s virtuoso sweep through modern German thought and culture will challenge and confound both the stereotypes the world has of Germany and those that Germany has of itself.

第二次世界大战期间，德国强调“人种论”，认为日耳曼民族是世界最优秀的民族。虽然这种说法日后被完全否定，但德国在过去两百多年从艺术、音乐到科学等领域，确实是人才辈出。
剑桥大学研究员彼得•沃森（Peter Watson）的叙述横贯1750年至今的德国现代思想与文化，将对全世界对于德国的陈旧观念发起挑战，让人们重新认识德语社会曾对世界带来的影响。
从巴洛克时代的结束、音乐家巴赫的逝世到1933年希特勒的崛起，德国从一个文化贫瘠的西方国家转变为一个重要的文化强国——甚至比法国、英国、意大利、荷兰、美国更具创造性、更有影响力。
在20世纪的最初几十年中，德国的艺术家、作家、学者、哲学家、科学家和工程师将本国的科学文化推向了难以想象的高度。
截至1933年，获得诺贝尔奖的德国人比任何其他国家都多，甚至超过了英国和美国的总和。然而，阿道夫·希特勒和第三帝国的统治使得天才锐减。这个残酷的事实使得德国取得的许多成就至今仍被阴影笼罩。
但当时，德国人是如何扭转国家大局，造就了文化领域一枝独秀的地位？
在这本兼容并包的文化与思想史中，彼得·沃森追溯历史真相，探索了德国天才的起源。他解释了德国文化为何能蓬勃发展、如何塑造了人们的生活。最重要的是，德国的科学文化如何持续影响着我们的世界。
作者还提出，德国思想是现代西方文化的巅峰。从贝多芬、康德到尼采，从歌德、瓦格纳到孟德尔、普朗克，从黑格尔、马克思到弗洛伊德、勋伯格，无数大师塑造了这种文化。
此外，尽管经历了第二次世界大战，约瑟夫·博伊斯（Joseph Beuys，艺术家）、于尔根·哈贝马斯（Juergen Habermas，哲学家）、约瑟夫·拉辛格（Joseph Alois Ratzinger，枢机主教）等重要人物保证了德国智慧至今仍兴旺发展。
《德国天才》是一部引人入胜，气魄宏大的编年史……英语目前在艺术和科学领域占据主导地位，但沃森另辟蹊径，带你回到很久以前德语一家独大的时刻。

Peter Watson's hugely ambitious and stimulating history of ideas from deep antiquity to the present day&#8212from the invention of writing, mathematics, science, and philosophy to the rise of such concepts as the law, sacrifice, democracy, and the soul&#8212offers an illuminated path to a greater understanding of our world and ourselves.

From Freud to Babbitt, from
to Sartre to the Great Society, from the Theory of Relativity to counterculture to Kosovo,
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.

Peter Watson's hugely ambitious and stimulating history of ideas from deep antiquity to the present day—from the invention of writing, mathematics, science, and philosophy to the rise of such concepts as the law, sacrifice, democracy, and the soul—offers an illuminated path to a greater understanding of our world and ourselves.

The idea of the French way of life has been an endless source of fascination. When we think of France we think of food and fashion, of intellect and taste, sociability and fierce national pride. What is behind these conceptions of the French? How did France become the country it is today, and what makes it exceptional?
Journalist and historian Peter Watson sets out to answer these questions in The French Mind, a dazzling cultural history of France that takes us from the 17th century to the present day through the nation’s most innovative and influential thinkers. He opens the doors to the Renaissance salons that acted as a breeding ground for poets, philosophers and scientists, and tells the extraordinary forgotten stories of the women who ran these vibrant and definitively French institutions, fostering a culture of intellectualism unmatched anywhere else in the word. On the way we witness the rise of café and restaurants, the changing relationship between the bourgeoisie and the French monarchy, and the bloody birth of a republic. From the French revolution to the country’s occupation by Nazi Germany, Watson argues that a series of devastating military defeats played a key role in shaping the resilient character of a nation, as well as its exceptionalism.
The French Mind is a history of breathtaking scope, propelled forward by the characters Watson brings to vivid life: the artists, revolutionaries and writers who loved, inspired and competed with one another over four hundred years. It documents the shaping of a nation whose global influence, in art and culture, politics and philosophy, cannot be overestimated.

A brilliant history of science over the past 150 years that offers a powerful new argument--that the many disparate scientific branches are converging on the same truths. Convergence is a history of modern science with an original and significant twist. Various scientific disciplines, despite their very different beginnings, have been coming together over the past 150 years, converging and coalescing. Intimate connections have been discovered between physics and chemistry, psychology and biology, genetics and linguistics. In this groundbreaking book, Peter Watson identifies one extraordinary master narrative, capturing how the sciences are slowly resolving into one overwhelming, interlocking story about the universe. Watson begins his narrative in the 1850s, the decade when, he argues, the convergence of the sciences began. The idea of the conservation of energy was introduced in this decade, as was Darwin's theory of evolution--both of which rocketed the sciences forward and revealed unimagined interconnections and overlaps between disciplines. The story then proceeds from each major breakthrough and major scientist to the next, leaping between fields and linking them together. Decade after decade, the story captures every major scientific advance en route to the present, proceeding like a cosmic detective story, or the world's most massive code-breaking effort. Watson's is a thrilling new approach to the history of science, revealing how each piece falls into place, and how each uncovers an "emerging order." Convergence is, as Nobel Prize-winning physicist Steven Weinberg has put it, "The deepest thing about the universe." And Watson's comprehensive and eye-opening book argues that all our scientific efforts are indeed approaching unity. Told through the eyes of the scientists themselves, charting each discovery and breakthrough, it is a gripping way to learn what we now know about the universe and where our inquiries are heading.

A true-life thriller completely exposes the network behind the illegal trade in ancient artifacts--and features a rich cast of rogues and some of the world's most prestigious art institutions
The story begins, as stories do in all good thrillers, with a botched robbery and a police chase. Eight Apuleian vases of the fourth century B.C. are discovered in the swimming pool of a German-based art smuggler. More valuable than the recovery of the vases, however, is the discovery of the smuggler's card index detailing his deals and dealers. It reveals the existence of a web of tombaroli-tomb raiders-who steal classical artifacts, and a network of dealers and smugglers who spirit them out of Italy and into the hands of wealthy collectors and museums.
Peter Watson, a former investigative journalist for the London Sunday Times and author of two previous exposes of art world scandals, names the key figures in this network that has depleted Europe's classical artifacts. Among the loot are the irreplaceable and highly collectable vases of Euphronius, the equivalent in their field of the sculpture of Bernini or the painting of Michelangelo. The narrative leads to the doors of some major institutions: Sothebys, the Getty Museum in L.A., the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York among them.
Filled with great characters and human drama, The Medici Conspiracy authoritatively exposes another shameful round in one of the oldest games in the world: theft, smuggling and duplicitous dealing, all in the name of art.

这是一部煌煌百万言、面向普通读者的百科全书式巨著。接续《思想史：从火到弗洛伊德》的线索，纵览风云变幻的20世纪，拨开战争和政治的迷雾，从思想入手理解这一百年人类的智力成就。
20世纪既是人类的多事之秋，也是思想进步的辉煌世纪。在这个世纪，全人类在奴役、对峙、战争和解放的裹挟中曲折前进、求同存异，我们也在各大学科中取得了微观粒子、基因结构、现代主义等重大发现。彼得·沃森用精准和优美的叙述笔法，将人类在20世纪取得的思想发展娓娓道来，帮助21世纪的读者理解我们如何抵达当今的世界，未来又会去向何方。
这是一部用思想写成的20世纪通史，书中的主角不再是世界大战和政治博弈，但它将包含战争的思想后果、冷战时期的科学竞赛、去殖民化浪潮的余波等仍旧与我们息息相关的精神财富，它们将会是我们理解当今世界，理解人类自身的关键所在。