Table of Contents

Doomsday and after; the end of the world in Vienna; interrogating the universe; trains, cars, aeroplanes; "Zaum"; metamorphoses; the adventures of Mercury; returning the sky; arms and mankind; the beginning of the world in Moscow and Petrograd; the new human beings; vessels and voids; the mysteries of Paris; the end of the world in Berlin; the early people; spring, sacred and profane; the new inhumanity; the Chapliniad; the age of light; power and darkness; Ameriques, Amerika; the end of the world at Hiroshima; America and infinitude; Popism; the prosthetic God; the newer human beings; third worlds; spaceship Japan; the great re-engagement; "keep on going".

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A thoughtful look at art and culture from the turn of the century through to the present

About the Author

Peter Conrad taught English literature at Christ Church, Oxford, from 1973 to 2011. He has written more than twenty books, including How the World Was Won: The Americanization of Everywhere; Creation: Artists, Gods & Origins; At Home in Australia; and Modern Times, Modern Places: Life and Art in the Twentieth Century, all published by Thames & Hudson.

Reviews

'… a book with everything in it, a fascinating melange, going in all directions at once' - Hanif Kureishi, Guardian (Books of the Year)

'A blockbuster of a book, a work which will inspire admiration and wonder … writing with equal assurance about poetry, novels, painting, architecture, film and music ' - Sunday Telegraph

'Conrad is stunningly well-informed, compulsively allusive and equipped with the kind of imagination that transforms the base metal of contemporary history into pure gold ' - Robert McCrum, Observer

'Tells the story of modern cultural history with unflagging freshness, and without an ounce of surplus stylistic fat' - Terry Eagleton, London Review of Books