Capital of the Mind: How Edinburgh Changed the World - Couverture souple

A hugely readable and comprehensive review of this volatile period in the city's life . . . He brings a natural storyteller's relish to his subject . . . an utterly compelling and captivating work (Irvine Welsh, The Guardian)

Mr Buchan . . . excels at the dramatic action . . . he combines deft broad strokes with intricate details, shading in apparent dry subjects with innumerable and delightful anecdotes that bring the old city to life (Economist)

Mr Buchan has a clear writing style, a light touch and a irreverent sense of humour . . . [he] makes difficult subjects accessible and, sometimes, poetic (Economist)

Buchan gives us a novelist's evocative account of the men involved and the squalid, violent, bigoted streets of Edinburgh...The book is a triumph of fact-based, imaginatively expressed writing. (Magnus Magnusson, New Statesman)

As Buchan says in this marvellous book, "there is no city like Edinburgh in all the world" (Ferdinand Mount, Sunday Times)

Buchan's confident and astringent study is based on an informed love of Scotland and its stories are told to excellent effect (Karl Miller, Telegraph)

Vigorous and entertaining (Paul Johnson, Sunday Telegraph)

There have been many books about "The Athens of the North", but none as authoritative as this (The Times)

Edinburgh ... laid the mental foundations for the modern world (Sunday Telegraph)

Edinburgh teems on these pages (Independent)

How did a notoriously poor, alcoholic, violent and smelly town, consisting of 40,000 inhabitants, make such an impression on its age and on ours? So that Voltaire wrote, with more than a dash of malice that 'today it is from Scotland that we get rules of taste in all the arts, from epic poetry to gardening'?

The leading lights of the Scottish Enlightenment - David Hume, Adam Smith, Adam Ferguson, William Cullen and James Hutton - transformed the way we treat our perceptions and feelings as well as mechanical processes, sickness and health, trade, money, relations between the sexes, the purposes of existence and government. In just fifty years, Edinburgh produced more philosophical landmarks than a town of its size since the Athens of Socrates.

In an account of exceptionally close focus, James Buchan resurrects every aspect of eighteenth-century Edinburgh, and shows how a succession of disasters demolished old systems of thought and behaviour to set Edinburgh's men and women off in strange new directions. Capital of the Mind opens a fascinating window on a glorious time when Edinburgh was the most beautiful and philosophical city in Europe.