A C Grayling
The Progress of Pulchritude
On Beauty: A History of a Western Idea
By Umberto Eco (ed)
Secker & Warburg 438pp £25 order from our bookshop
ALTHOUGH DESCRIBED AS 'editor' of this attractive and intriguing book, Umberto Eco is decidedly its author. The same mixture of academic instinct and narrative talent that characterises his other non-fiction is present here again, and with it the same wide and reflective sweep. The mixture and the sweep are sure to offend purists among scholars, for whom the measure of fitness in such a work is the inverse relationship between narrowness of scope and number of footnotes - the narrower the scope and the larger the number of footnotes, the better.
Of course, that is how it should be for scholarly works, but happily the wider intelligent public is not always forgotten, and it is to them that Eco offers this history of ideas about beauty. Following the Wittgensteinian precept of showing rather than saying he offers a history by means
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
'Within hours, the news spread. A grimy gang of desperadoes had been captured just in time to stop them setting out on an assassination plot of shocking audacity.'
@katheder on the Cato Street Conspiracy of 1820.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/butchers-knives-treason-and-plot
'It is the ... sketches of the local and the overlooked that lend this book its density and drive, and emphasise Britain’s mostly low-key riches – if only you can be bothered to buy an anorak and seek.'
Jonathan Meades on the beauty of brutalism.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/castles-of-concrete
'Cruickshank’s history reveals an extraordinary eclecticism of architectural styles and buildings, from Dutch Revivalism to Arts and Crafts experimentation, from Georgian terraces to Victorian mansion blocks.'
William Boyd on the architecture of Chelsea.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/where-george-eliot-meets-mick-jagger