From Dawn to Decadence: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life - Tapa dura

'Barzun's aperçus on the religion, politics, literature, music, art and personalities of the past five centuries add up to what is arguably the best thinking man's bedside book ever written' PETER GREEN, TLS

‘This astonishing and monumental work may fairly take its place alongside Gibbon, and for much the same array of qualities: a majestic view of five hundred years of history, done in great style, with vast erudition and a continuously entertaining idiosyncrasy of judgement’
ALISTAIR COOKE

‘To define Western culture is the most delicate and difficult of all operations. Jacques Barzun is one of the most cultivated exemplars of Western civilization and his book contains the experience and the reflection of a lifetime. He tells us not to judge past centuries by our standards and to recognize that, however different, those centuries have made us what we are.’
NOEL ANNAN

‘Jacques Barzun’s summa is the work of a very great historian and of a seer. The phrase from the Bible in apposite: “The hearing ear, and the seeing eye” is his great gift – and a gift to his readers.’
JOHN LUKACS

‘From Dawn to Decadence is a personal, witty, learned, bold, and above all wise retrospect of the past half-millennium. One will read it through with mounting interest, and then go back again and again to savour favourite parts of it’
GERTRUDE HIMMELFARB

The bestselling (New York Times No. 3) history chronicling half a millennium of Western culture.

From Dawn To Decadence is the French-American historian Jacques Barzun’s great opus. It is the product of a lifetime of separate studies which he now sets down in one powerful narrative, interspersing his entertaining analysis of wars, philosophy, science, manners, sex, religion, morals, art, et al, from the Reformation to the present day, with biographical sketches of influential historical figures (including Luther, Charles V, Descartes, Bacon, Machiavelli, Shakespeare, Cromwell, Peter the Great, Defoe, Swift, Rubens, Bach, Byron, Pascal, Florence Nightingale, James Joyce...) His positive conclusion is that the decadence of the current age is merely a watershed for a new age in which Western culture will again flourish.

This is heavyweight history written with great wit and verve, comparable in scope with the Big Ideas and Big Themes history of Paul Kennedy’s Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, which was a huge bestseller that was first ‘made’ in the US, and Paul Johnson (The Birth of the Modern; Intellectuals; Twentieth Century Britain). With Barzun’s lucid and easy style it is also a very accesible book which will be eagerly devoured by history and culture lovers alike.