"This narrative history of the people and ideas that shaped the modern world is a brilliantly reasoned examination of the thought and individuals that made twentieth-century culture. From Freud to Babbitt, from Relativity to Susan Sontag, from Proust to Henri Bergson to Saul Bellow, the book's range is encyclopedic, covering the major writers, artists, scientists, and philosophers who produced the ideas by which we live.

Beginning with four seminal ideas that were introduced in 1990 - the unconscious, the gene, the quantum, and Picasso's first paintings in Paris - Peter Watson has produced a fluent and engaging narrative of the intellectual tradition of the past century."--BOOK JACKET.