The Swerve - How the World Became Modern

WW Norton and Company, 2012. Fade strip on front cover next to spine, otherwise good secondhand condition.

Almost 600 years ago a short, genial man took a very old manuscript off a library shelf. With excitement, he saw what he had discovered and ordered it copied. The book was a miraculously surviving copy of an ancient Roman philosophical epic. On the Nature of Things by Lucretius, and it changed the course of history. The ideas found in the ancient volume fuelled the Renaissance, inspiring Botticelli, shaping the thought of Montaigne, Darwin and Einstein, and made possible the world as we know it...