Sarah Bakewell

The bestselling prizewinning author of How to Live and At the Existentialist CafA brings us a celebration of 700 years of human endeavour and achievement in which dozens of philosophers scientists classicists architects educationalists and others explore the art of being human Humanly Possible is a wide-ranging personal thought-provoking and entertaining journey through the battle of ideas over some 700 years of history - mostly but not exclusively in Europe. Through a mixture of biography and philosophy Bakewell seeks to understand what humanism is why it has continued to flourish despite opposition from fanatics mystics tyrants and cultural pessimists of all kinds and exactly why we should value and defend it in the 21st century.