Memory: An anthology - Harriet Harvey Wood & A.S. Byatt

This fascinating anthology, edited by Harriet Harvey Wood and A.S. Byatt, introduces us to a wide range of arguments on the subject of memory, the thread that holds our lives, and our history, together. The first part of the book contains specially commissioned essays by writers with interests and expertise in different fields — from discussions of memory and evolution by Patrick Bateson and neurobiology and the chemistry of the brain by Steven Rose, to Craig Raine on literature, Ignés Sodré on psychoanalysis, the late Malcolm Bowie on memory, music, art and the self, and the biographer Richard Holmes on ‘memory and forgetting’.

These provocative essays are amplified by a rich selection of extracts. Some expand the arguments, bringing us up to date with current thinking; others meditate on traditions of remembering; still more show memory in action, from childhood on. Arranged in themed sections, the writings move through the ages from Aristotle and Cicero to St Augustine, Montaigne and Shakespeare; Voltaire and Hume to Wordsworth and Browning; Freud and Virginia Woolf to Jorge Luis Borges, W.G. Sebald, Haruki Murakami and London taxi drivers. Stimulating, provocative, often funny, sometimes poignant, Memory is a book to treasure — and remember.