A C Grayling

In Two Minds

The Master and his Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World

By

Yale University Press 597pp £25 order from our bookshop

There is something magnificent about the ambition of Iain McGilchrist’s book. It offers nothing less than an account of human nature and Western civilisation as outcomes of the competition between the human brain’s asymmetrical halves. Thus baldly described, the endeavour doubtless seems implausible at least.

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