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Capital of the Mind

Capital of the Mind

How Edinburgh Changed the World

by James Buchan

Imprint: Origin

448 Pages, 5.1 x 7.8 in, 16pp b/w plates

Paperback
9781839830907
May 2025
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Paperback
9781841586397
October 2007
Out of print. Available in digital formats at the links below.

$15.95

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9780857904850
January 2013

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Praise

In the early 18th century, Edinburgh was a filthy backwater town synonymous with poverty and disease. Yet by century's end, it had become the marvel of modern Europe, home to the finest minds of the day and their breathtaking innovations in architecture, politics, science, the arts, and economies - all of which continues to echo loudly today. Adam Smith penned "The Wealth of Nations". James Boswell produced "The Life of Samuel Johnson". Alongside them, pioneers such as David Hume, Robert Burns, James Hutton, and Sir Walter Scott transformed the way we understand our perceptions and feelings, sickness and health, relations between the sexes, the natural world, and the purpose of existence.

James Buchan beautifully reconstructs the intimate geographic scale and boundless intellectual milieu of Enlightenment Edinburgh. With the scholarship of an historian and the elegance of a novelist, he tells the story of the triumph of this unlikely town and the men whose vision brought it into being.

James Buchan is a novelist and critic. He is the author of the Persian Bride, a New York Times Notable Book, as well as Frozen Desire, an examination of money that received the Duff Cooper Prize. He has also won the Whitbread First Novel Award and the Guardian Fiction Prize. Buchan is a contributor to The New York Times Book Review and The New York Observer, and a former correspondent for the Financial Times. He lives in Norfolk, England.

[An] elegant portrait of Edinburgh in the age of Enlightenment' ~Times Literary Supplement

A triumph of fact-based, imaginatively expressed writing' ~Magnus Magnusson

As Buchan says in this marvellous book, "there is no city like Edinburgh in all the world"' ~Sunday Times

Buchan's confident and astringent study is based on an informed love of Scotland and its stories are told to excellent effect' ~Daily Telegraph

Capital of the Mind creates a psychogeography as lovely as Edinburgh's own. A breathless chronicle of the fondness of genius for its own company' ~Sunday Observer