Published in 2023
464 pages
14 hours and 27 minutes
Sarah Bakewell was born in Bournemouth on the English south coast, but spent most of her childhood in Sydney, Australia, after several years travelling the hippie trail through Asia with her parents. Returning to Britain, she studied philosophy at the University of Essex and worked as a curator of early printed books at London’s Wellcome Library for ten years before devoting herself to full-time writing in 2002. She now lives mostly in London, and teaches Creative Writing at Kellogg College, Oxford.
Her four books are all biographical, and the most recent two, How to Live: a life of Montaigne and At the Existentialist Cafe, also explore philosophical ideas. How to Live won the Duff Cooper Prize and the U.S. National Book Critics’ Circle Award for Biography, and At the Existentialist Cafe was chosen in 2016 as one of the New York Times‘ Ten Best Books of the Year.
What is this book about?
The bestselling, prizewinning author of How to Live and At the Existentialist Café brings us a celebration of 700 years of human endeavour and achievement, in which dozens of philosophers, scientists, classicists, architects, educationalists and others explore the art of being human
Humanly Possible is a wide-ranging, personal, thought-provoking and entertaining journey through the battle of ideas over some 700 years of history—mostly, but not exclusively, in Europe. Through a mixture of biography and philosophy, Bakewell seeks to understand what humanism is, why it has continued to flourish despite opposition from fanatics, mystics, tyrants and cultural pessimists of all kinds, and exactly why we should value and defend it in the 21st century.
