The Bloomsbury Book of the Mind

This book is a real pleasure to browse, and one can be glad of the late Anthony Storr's encouragement to the editor to produce it. Compiled by a clearly civilised psychiatrist, it consists of key writings on the mind from Plato to the current day. The material is organised around six main themes: perception, memory, emotion, thought, consciousness and self. Each section then has an introduction followed by passages from various writers, each of which is itself engagingly introduced by the editor. Many extracts are little more than a page long so the effect is a cross between a compendium and an extended commonplace book. There is a full subject and people index, and I found it intriguing that the longest single entry comes under 'fear'. A book that most readers of this review would be pleased to own.