In this fascinating and scholarly overview, George Woodcock, author and poet, allows us to experience the beauty, the savagery and the all-encompassing impact of The Marvellous Century.

It was an era of personalities and uprisings.

• It was the time of Xenophanes, Cyrus, Solon the lawmaker, Sappho, the Buddha, Aeschylus, Pythagoras, Confucius, Lao-tzu and Nebuchadnezzar.
• It was an era of prose reawakenings, the exploration of rational thought, the central Asian silk trade, and the writing of the Upanishads.
• For the Chinese, it was the period of Spring and Autumn under the Chou Kingdom.
• Christianity, Islam, Zoroastrianism and Modern Judaism had their roots in the sixth century.

• The Greek philosopher, Thales, studied astronomy and geometry;

  - passing on knowledge picked up from the Egyptians, and

  - he was the one that first postulated the angles at the base of an isosceles triangle to be equal.

• In India, atomic theories emerged, and geography, geology and physics all developed as disciplines.

"History never arranges itself in neat capsules of a hundred years each, and what I am writing about when I name the sixth century is a period of between 120 and 130 years, characterized by a cluster of events that changed irrevocably the way men looked upon the universe and even upon themselves."
- George Woodcock

George Woodcock (1912-1995) is one of Canada's best-known and most prolific authors. He was born in Winnipeg and educated in England, where he socialized with some of the century's most prominent writers and intellectuals including Aldous Huxley, George Orwell, Herbert Read and T.S. Eliot. He returned to Canada in 1949 and taught at the University of British Columbia for many years. In 1959, he founded the journal Canadian Literature. His contribtution to Canadian culture is immeasurable; he either wrote or edited over one-hundred books including The Crystal Spirit, his Governor-Genral's award-winning biography of Orwell; Gabriel Dumont, another bestselling biography; and Anarchism a guide to the political philosophy which continues to be read around the world. His wide range of writing includes literary criticism, poetry, travel writing, plays, social history, biography, politics and essays.

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