A compelling history of the famous London club and its members' impact on Britain's scientific, creative, and official life When it was founded in 1824, the Athenæum broke the mold. Unlike in other preeminent clubs, its members were chosen on the basis of their achievements rather than on their background or political affiliation. Public rather than private life dominated the agenda. The club, with its tradition of hospitality to conflicting views, has attracted leading scientists, writers, artists, and intellectuals throughout its history, including Charles Darwin and Matthew Arnold, Edward Burne-Jones and Yehudi Menuhin, Winston Churchill and Gore Vidal. This book is not presented in the traditional, insular style of club histories, but devotes attention to the influence of Athenians on the scientific, creative, and official life of the nation. From the unwitting recruitment of a Cold War spy to the welcome admittance of women, this lively and original account explores the corridors and characters of the club; its wider political, intellectual, and cultural influence; and its recent reinvention.

The twelve essays in this bicentennial publication address some of the most important episodes and issues during the Boston Athenæum's two-hundred-year history. Two chapters focus on the Athenæum's origins: what were its models, and how did it differ from contemporary institutions? Other chapters discuss the role of women, prints and photographs, the scruples collection, architectural holdings, and the book arts collection. Two essays are devoted to the Athenæum's role in the creation of the Boston Public Library and the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. Three other chapters discuss nineteenth-century British responses to the cultural life of Boston, the role of the Athenæum's conservation program, and the recently established Calderwood Writing Initiative. Each essay will remind both scholars and the general reader of the various roles the Athenæum has played in the cultural life of the nation. Founded in 1807, the Boston Athenæum, the largest membership library in North America, boasts an extensive collection of rare books and manuscripts as well as one of the most significant art collections at any American library. It is home to more than 700,000 books, including approximately one-half of George Washington's personal library from Mount Vernon.

"The modern literary critic", T. S. Eliot wrote in 1929, "must be an 'experimenter' outside of what you might at first consider his own province; [...] there is no literary problem which does not lead us irresistibly to larger problems." This book follows Eliot's principle and situates his literary and critical work in a wide context that reveals manifold links between aesthetics, ethics, politics and epistemology: the historical context of early-twentieth-century idealism, vitalism and pragmatism, especially the intensely political Bergsonian controversy, and the modern context of the philosophies of Charles Taylor, Michel Foucault and Richard Rorty. 'Knowledge', it argues, was verbalised in the modernist age, individualised into the act of 'knowing', an act with motives and goals, and thus introduced into the realm of ethics - a process central to twentieth-century thought. Eliot's poems especially, constructed as "a life composed", a literary lifetime linking composition and composure, ponder the virtue of precision, the sins of pride and "mental sloth", the temptation of prejudice and the need for conviction. Decidedly tentative, Eliot's poems solve the problem of morally significant literature. In a century of suspicion, they ask the crucial question of where one should start to rely.

Originally published as O Ateneu in 1888, The Athenaeum is a classic of Brazilian literature, here translated into English in its entirety for the first time. The first-person narrator, Sergio, looks back to his time at the eponymous boarding school, with its autocratic principal and terrifying student body. Sergio’s account of his humiliating experiences as a student, with its frank discussion of corruption and homoerotic bullying, makes it clear that his school is structured and administered so as to reproduce the class divisions and power structure of the larger Brazilian society. In its muckraking mode, the novel is in the spirit of Naturalism, imported from France and well-acclimated to Brazil, where it blossomed. At the same time, Pompéia maintains the novel’s credibility as a bildungsroman by portraying the narrator’s psychological development. The novel’s conclusion suggests both a doomed society and its possible redemption, indicative of a moment of upheaval and transition in Brazilian history.

Contains addresses of T. Bailey Myers, Parke Godwin, George P. Putnam and others, and poem by Henry T. Tuckerman.