Newton
Author(s): Peter Ackroyd
Isaac Newton (1642-1727), the English genius, made his greatest contributions to original thought before the age of twenty-five, while at home in Lincolnshire escaping the great plague of 1665, a period of which he wrote: "I was in the prime of age for invention." Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge, an MP, Master of the Mind and President of the Royal Society, Newton, the author of "Principia", one of the most important books in the history of science, was fascinated by calculus, the planets and the 'laws of motion', and, in keeping with his age, blurred the borders between natural philosophy and speculation: he was as passionate about astrology as astronomy and dabbled in alchemy, while his religious faith was never undermined by his scientific efforts.
Product Information
The third brilliant short biography in Peter Ackroyd's Brief Lives. Newton is a companion volume to Chaucer and Turner
Written in splendidly elastic prose, each sentence a springboard for the next, it provides a concise, fair and highly readable biography of a singular genius."
- "The Times
Peter Ackroyd is the author of a magnificent biography of Shakespeare, which takes the reader into the heart of the 16th century, and London: the Biography, a massive bestseller in both hardback and paperback. His non fiction books have variously won the Whitbread Biography Award, the Royal Society of LIterature's William Heinemann Award (jointly) and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize. He has also won numerous prizes for his historical novels, and is the holder of a CBE for services to literature. He is the biographer of Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, Dickens, Blake and Thomas More, as well as the author of the influential Albion: the origins of the English imagination; and has written and presented three TV series for the BBC - on Dickens (2002), London (2004) and the Romantic Poets (2005). He lives in London.
General Fields
- :
- : Penguin Random House
- : Vintage
- : 0.146
- : 01 May 2007
- : 199mm X 131mm X 13mm
- : United Kingdom
- : books
Special Fields
- : Peter Ackroyd
- : Paperback
- : English
- : 530.092
- : very good
- : 163
- : Illustrations