'Lives of the Artists' by Vasari

Every great writer needs a Boswell and in Vasari's 'Lives of the Artists' the Florentine artists have one.  The stories and exploits of great artists such as Giotto, Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and others, about how they got their first starts and the anecdotes behind the great works, is told with insider appreciation of Vasari, himself a painter.  And there is much to wonder at here.

From the story of one painter getting captured by pirates only to be released when he paints such a wonderful painting of the slave owner, to Giotto's 'o' and da Vinci's empathy for caged birds, it makes you feel that those times were incredibly rich and fruitful, a time of humanising development and excellence.

I say a rich time because it wasn't all painting nice pictures, there was war too and then the mathematically minded artists turned engineers creating weapons and defensives to help with the combat.

In fact these artists were very scientifically literate, especially da Vinci who used his sketches as a way of trying to understand how the human body works.  The art they made was another expression of their creative scientific imaginations showing how the divide between the 'two cultures' was not always so and in fact their science helped invigorate their art and visa versa.

Their art was only possible with the patronage of the popes who wanted religious icons in their churches to bring a bit of colour and visual flair to the proceedings.  Their scope of what they could make was, perhaps, a bit narrow but it was a very potent focal point for them to focus in and delve deep in the great biblical subjects that inspired their culture.

These stories inspire me to create short dramas about each of the twenty artists listed as they are not stories that get retold much and yet to have such devotion to master a craft really does leave you in awe.

These artists changed the world for the better.  Thankfully Vasari has wonderfully capture the spirit of those times and left a tangible, if possibly inaccurate, book on the subject that artists in the future will no doubt turn to and draw inspiration from as they make their way through the world.

'Bully for Brontosaurus' by Stephen Jay Gould

'So much of science proceeds by telling stories- and we are especially vulnerable to constraints of this medium because we so rarely recognize what we are doing' so says Stephen Jay Gould in 'Bully for Brontosaurus' his fifth volume of collected essays in science popularisation which do tell good stories about the various aspects of evolution and considerations for the intellectual world. 

'Some people have seen me as a polymath, but I insist that I am a tradesman' the ever modest, ever humble Gould writes in the introduction implying the hard work involved in learning and the functionality of what is learned.  Certainly by reading him you get a deeper appreciation of just how Darwin has changed culture and how much of his theory seeps into everything.

For Gould Homo sapiens  is a 'tiny and accidental evolutionary twig' that conducts an 'interesting but dangerous experiment in consciousness' where 'the history of life is a tale of decimation and later stabilization of few surviving anatomies, not a story of steady expansion and progress'.  Yet this does not seem to dim his enthusiasm for being part of it, to experience it at all, a privilege to be enjoyed if we can be aware enough to.  His love for the subject is contagious as his interesting writing makes you interested in what he is writing about, popular without dumbing down or making concessions.  It is a masterclass in communication.

Making the case for enlightenment Gould is in a tough fight against anti-intellectualism: 

'We live in a profoundly non-intellectual culture, made all the worse by a passive hedonism abetted by the spread of wealth and the dissipation into countless electronic devices that impart the latest in entertainment and supposed information- all in short (and loud) doses of "easy learning"'.  

In trying by 'noting popular trends and trying to divert some of their energy into rivulets that might benefit learning and education' he gives a tour to a world of ideas, interesting in and of themselves that may prick curiosity and lead someone further down the road of understanding of the world and it's workings for those people who haven't only let the world work for them. 'We must rage against the dying of the light- and although Dylan Thomas spoke of bodily death in his famous line, we may also apply his words to the extinction of wonder in the mind, by pressures of conformity in an anti-intellectual culture'

He is a dispeller of misconceptions about science, 'science is a method for testing claims about the natural world, not an immutable compendium of absolute truths', and gives descriptions of scientists, 

'You might almost define a good scientist as a person with the horse sense to discern the largest answerable question- and to shun useless issues that sound grander', allowing readers a chance to change their perspective on how to view such matters that may give a greater clarity than previous prejudices afforded.

I've taken a lot of inspiration from Gould in writing my blogs; his friendliness, his kindness and his knowledge are all things that I aspire to personify in my writings.  It's been highly enjoyable to read about the evolution of the typewriter, the furore around Darwin and current culture as he makes it easy for me.  A dip-in book for those odd, loose moments hanging around the house that satisfies while being edifying.

The human race has been a very colourful experiment 'So why not keep this interesting thought experiment around, at least for another planetary second or two?'

'History of the World' by J. M. Roberts

In terms of the universe we have just arrived, yet in our short time we have travelled far  as J. M. Roberts looks back on human existence in 'History of the World'.  How can one write such a book where each epoch requires detailed study in it's own right and also for it to be coherent to read?  With a lot of editing I imagine.  Yet going into our past has been absorbing; civilisations rising and falling, wars and inventions, centuries of stability and stagnation and decades of combustible innovation.  To know where we are is to look back as a means of going forward.

Clocking in at 1109 pages it is a bible of history that contains almost everything from Ice Age man to the Cold War.  First written in 1976 it is a gargantuan of social evolution making you appreciate the differences in culture and sensing the historical forces that guide present life.  There are some great stories here.  The conquer Alexander the Great meeting the philosopher Diogenes, the conversion of the Indian leader Asoka from a war faring man to peaceful man, and the Egyptian King Menes diverting the river Nile by a levee.  So this is a very rich book and all will be made rich by reading it.

It is, after all, our heritage that we can comfortably read at a our leisure with curiosity, excitement, fear and wonder.  But of course this is the point of view of one British scholar, as encompassing of a view that might be, whose general thrust might be different from say a Japanese scholar or a Mexican one.  People who write histories of the world may be seen to be the machos of the intellectual world who decide to write not just one thing but everything.  This is 'Moby Dick', it's 'Ulysses', it's big and it has something to prove.

As incomplete as it must be it is nonetheless an engaging summary of human life.  Decidedly academic, unlike Andrew Marr's recent version which is a rollicking tale from a story spinning journalist and has more juicier, plumbable, quote to be seized with joy and re-told to your mates in the pub, it is very readable for the student of history as it does go into enough detail while giving a understandable overview.

It's the book I read when I can't sleep, a long almost chronological story of people who had lived, did things, and left it to us.  It's humbling to know that we now exist in relative comfort after hundreds of generations struggle against famine, war and poverty that those people kept going against the odds and worked together so that we may have this futuristic present, which for all it's problems is probably the time I would most like to live.  It's a great time to be alive because so many people have created things we can now take from and make our own thereby creating our own things for the future.

This is a book to be reading for the rest of your life; always finding something new in it that you hadn't noticed before, being in awe of time and it's progression, and thinking on those lives.