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The Body in the Library is a unique tour of the history of medicine and its practitioners. It provides a nuanced and realistic picture of how medicine and society have abetted and thwarted each other ever since the lawyers behind the French Revolution banished the clergy and replaced them with doctors, priests of the body.

Ranging from Charles Dickens to Oliver Sacks, Anton Chekhov to Raymond Queneau, Fanny Burney to Virginia Woolf, Miguel Torga to Guido Ceronetti, The Body in the Library is an anthology of poems, stories, journal entries, Socratic dialogue, table-talk, clinical vignettes, aphorisms, and excerpts written by doctor-writers themselves.

Engaging and provocative, philosophical and instructive, intermittently funny and sometimes appalling, this anthology sets out to stimulate and entertain. With an acerbic introduction and witty contextual preface to each account, it will educate both patients and doctors curious to know more about the historical dimensions of medical practice.

Armed with a first-hand experience of liberal medicine and knowledge of several languages, Iain Bamforth has scoured the literatures of Europe to provide a well-rounded and cross-cultural sense of what it means to be a doctor entering the twenty-first century. A book for every bedside. ... Read more

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The essays in this collection were written as reviews, mainly for The New York Review of Books and The New Yorker, on books by or about Alexander Pope, Vincent van Gogh, Thomas Mann, Virginia Woolf, Oscar Wilde, and A. E. Housman, or as introductions to editions of the classical Greek writers, the Protestant mystics, Shakespeare, Goethe, Kierkegaard, Tennyson, Grimm and Andersen, Poe, G. K. Chesterton, Paul Valéry, and others.Throughout, these prose pieces reveal the same wit and intelligence--as well as the vision--that sparked the brilliance of Auden's poetry. ... Read more

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"A Civilised Voice"
Just as W.H. Auden's verse of the 1930s came to define a specific poetic epoch (that of Spender, MacNeice, Day Lewis - the so-called "Auden generation"), so his body of essays and reviews has assumed an important place among the canon of literary criticism. Still, when we want a concise account of that troubling term "modernism" it is to Auden's "The Dyer's Hand" that we turn; his essays on Shakespeare remain among the best ever composed. The writings collected as "Forewords and Afterwords" serve to reinforce this status. Here Auden's great love of the written word (and of opera, too) is beautifully evinced. While a reasonable proportion of the essays deal with the Germans (Auden, after all, chose to live his final years in Austria), it is when he turns south, beyond the alps, that he is perhaps most interesting. I think it was Clive James who noted Auden's almost Bloomian fascination with Dante, and it is in "The Greeks and Us" (the opening essay of this volume) that we see this preoccupation with the Mediterranean emerge. Here Auden charts a wonderment with the Greeks which begins, as a boy, with the tales of Homer, flowers when one reads the tragedians, and is so inseparable from us that even today "everyone is born either a Platonist or an Aristotelian" (5). This essay - in its erudition, enthusiasm, in its thematic demands - then lays a groundwork from which all his other examinations grow. What is his essay on Kierkegaard but an affirmation of that need to "become fully conscious" (32) which he attributes to the Greeks? Even Wagner, "the greatest of the monsters", comes to embody someone "for better or worse, fully human" (32) when thought of in the terms he constructs in his first essay. Auden himself exemplifies that "civilsed voice" - refreshing, complete, humane, and which he associates with Pope - as he lays parts of the western literary tradition bare in "Forewords and Afterwords". Here his initial essay is a seed from which the others appear to grow, each representing a shoot - at once a departure but each feeding from the same root - on the same tree of human understanding.

A Learned and Thoughtful Collection by a Master
W.H. Auden was, of course, one of the 20th Century's greatest poets. This collection of essays, forewards and reviews illuminates his carefully thought out positions on poetry, literature, art, artists and religion. The book covers a period of over thirty years and the organization of the book is not chronological. Though this obscures the development of Auden's thoughts over time, it does serve as a useful almost biographical device. Beginning with the most esoteric discussions of Christian mysticism, the editor proceeds to go deeper and deeper into Auden himself, until he ends with a semi-autobiograhical account.Read in conjunction with the poetry, one feels sometimes that the poems do illustrate the philosophy more clearly than the prose, but notwithstanding, these essays are well worth reading. The essays on Goethe and Wagner are arresting insights about the relationship between the artist and his life that might startle those used to the conventional view of art derives from life. The format leads inevitably to repetition but the repetition is welcome as the concepts are often difficult and benefit from being brought forth in different contexts.

A wonderful review of spirituality
In the first half of the book, Auden has written a brilliant set of essays on Christian doctrine, thought and mysticism. The essays on Protestant Mysticism and Kierkegaard are worth the price of the entire volume. Thosewhose tastes run more to the literary will enjoy the bulk of the work. ... Read more

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Contents...
Edited, with an introduction, by W. H. Auden

Sydney Smith, the most famous wit of his generation (1771-1845) and is an example of English liberlism at its best. Starting as a village curate with little income and no influential friends, he went to Edinburgh as a tutor, and joined with Jeffrey, Brougham and Horner in founding The Edinburgh Review. Happily married, he moved in 1803 to London, where he was introduced into the Holland House circle, the center of Whig society, of which he became a popular and admired firgure. At the age of 38, he was banished by a Tory government to a village parsonage.

Sydney Smith was born on June 3, 1771, in Woodford, Essex, England.

Contents:

The Peter Plymley Letters,
Methodism,
Persecuting Bishops,
Letter to the Bishops of London,
What is a Puseyite? (poem),
Letters to Archdeacon Singleton,
Letter to Lord Lansdowne,
Letter to Mrs. Beach,
Two Letters to M.H. Beach,
Letter to Francis Jeffrey,
Letter to The Farmer Magazine,
Advice to Parishioners,
A Little Moral Advice,
Letter to Lady Georgianna Morpeth (See this letter below.),
A Nice Person,
Letter to Messrs. Hunt & Clark, Booksellers,
Letter to ....Bedford, Esq.,
Game Laws,
Spring Guns and Man Traps,
Counsel for Prisoners,
Too Much Latin and Greek,
Female Education,
The Society for the Suppression of Vice
Chimney Sweepers,
"Locking In" on Railways (two letters),
Modern Changes,
Letter to Francis Jeffrey (extract),
Letter to John Allen (extract),
Letter to Lord Grey and Lady Grey (extract),
Letter to Mr. Swing,
Four Speeches on the Reform Bill,
Ballot,
America,
On American Debts.
Letter to Lady Morpeth:

Dear Georgiana,

Nobody has suffered more from low spirits than I have

so I feel for you. Here are my prescriptions.

1st..Live as well as you dare.

2nd...Go into the shower-bath with a small quantity of water at a temperature low enough to give you a slight sensation of cold.

3rd....Amusing books.

4th...Short views of human lifenot further than dinner or tea.

5th...Beas busy as you can.

6th...See as much as you can of those friends who respect and like you.

7th And of those acquaintances who amuse you.

8th Make no secret of low spirits to your friends, but talk of them freelythey are always worse for dignified concealment.

9th Attend to the effects tea and coffee produce upon you.

10th Compare your lot with that of other people.

11th Don't expect too much from human lifea sorry business at the best.

12th Avoid poetry, dramatic representations (except comedy), music, serious novels, melancholy sentimental people, and every thing likely to excite feeling or emotion not ending in active benevolence.

13th Do good, and endeavour to please everybody of every degree.

14th Be as much as you can in the open air without fatigue.

15th Make the room where you commonly sit, gay and pleasant.

16th Struggle by little and little against idleness.

17th Don't be too severe upon yourself, or underrate yourself, but do yourself justice.

18th Keep good blazing fires.

19th Be firm and constant in the exercise of rational religion.

20th Believe me, dear Georgiana, your devoted servant, Sydney Smith

... Read more

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In this series, a contemporary poet advocates a poet of the past or present whom they have particularly admired. By their selection of verses and by the personal and critical reactions they express, the selectors offer intriguing insight into their own work. ... Read more

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A biography of W.H. Auden, which looks at his career as a poet, and also offers an insight into the personality of the private man behind the public reputation. First published in 1979. ... Read more

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Two Literary Greats in China, 1938
This is the record of a train journey from Hong Kong to Shanghai, made by Isherwood and Auden between February and June, 1938. The writers had been commissioned by their publisher to write a travel book about the East, the choice of itinerary left to their own discretion. With the outbreak of the Sino-Japanese War, the pair decided to go to China. As Isherwood says in the foreword: "We spoke no Chinese, and possessed no special knowledge of Far Eastern affairs." Acknowledging that he cannot vouch for the accuracy of many of the things told him by the Chinese, Isherwood continues: "We can only record, for the benefit of the reader who has never been to China, some impression of what he would be likely to see, and of what kind of stories he would be likely to hear."

In this collaborative effort, Isherwood wrote the text and Auden contributed a substantial body of verse. There is also a very good selection of photos, mostly of people, both notable (Madame Chiang Kai-shek, Chou En-lai) and obscure (soldiers, peasants).

Throughout their journey, Auden and Isherwood were treated as dignitaries, shown every deference by the locals and granted numerous audiences with both Chinese and European officials. They seem to always be sitting down to tea with somebody! Except for the occasional Japanese air raid, the travelers never get all that close to the war. The front is always somewhere out there on the periphery. I didn't find the book particulary illuminating about the nature of the Sino-Japanese War. There are a few mentions of the atrocities committed by the Japanese Army, but not much detail. That criticism notwithstanding, JOURNEY TO A WAR is a very interesting book for armchair travelers, and Auden and Isherwood are pleasant and amusing traveling companions. ... Read more

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This is the first volume in a new series on the work of poet W.H. Auden. It includes a large amount of unpublished material by Auden, notably six poems written in German in the early 1930s, translated by the poet and David Constantine, and the complete version of his important early essay, "Writing," with a new foreword by its original editor, Naomi Mitchinson. Substantial selections from Auden's letters to Stephen Spender, E.R. Dodds, and Mrs. Dodds are presented with full annotation. Including essays about Auden, his mentors, and contemporaries by leading scholars in the field, and advice on collecting Auden's works, Auden Studies is indispensable for students, bibliophiles, and general readers interested in the great poet and his fellow writers. ... Read more

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