The Soul of the Marionette

A generous and energising tumble of ideas…he is inventive and penetrating – Galen Strawson * Financial Times *Like Isaiah Berlin with a thing for sci-fi – Tibor Fischer * The Spectator *We might believe that we are on a voyage towards a future of perfect freedom, but Gray is here to tell us that we are really only going round in circles, repeating ancient heresies, and retelling old myths in modern cant – Stephen Cave * Literary Review *Gray must be one of the best read of contemporary philosophers, trawling insouciantly through high-, middle- and low-brow literature with the sharp-eyed eclecticism of a magpie of genius – John Banville * The Guardian *A brain-twisting meditation on freedom…a brief, elliptical inquiry designed to raise more questions than anyone could answer * Kirkus Reviews *

John Gray is the author of a number of highly regarded and controversial books, including False Dawn, Straw Dogs and, most recently, The Silence of Animals. He has taught at Oxford, Harvard, Yale and the LSE. John Banville described The Silence of Animals as ‘a marvellous statement of what it is to be both an animal and a human in the strange, terrifying and exquisite world in which we straw dogs find ourselves’.