Mortal Secrets

Fascinating... the best book I have read on Freud and Vienna. Lucid, sceptical, sagacious, it perfectly explains how we are all, like it or not, Freudians now * TLS, Books of the Year * Frank Tallis's lucid storytelling makes him an ideal guide in this dangerous but perennially exciting terrain * Sebastian Faulks * Tallis makes Freud's life and the lost world of Viennese society vividly comprehensible. Excellent and entertaining * Amanda Craig * An unusually well-balanced and remarkably fresh account of Freud's life and work - in historical and cultural context - viewed from the perspective of our own troubled times, and with contemporary scientific hindsight * Mark Solms, author of The Brain and the Inner World * Convincingly critical and convincingly admiring-among the best of innumerable Freud bios... Tallis provides an expert portrait of a brilliant, obsessive, ruthless figure * Kirkus * Takes a wide-ranging and fascinating look at how Sigmund Freud shaped and was shaped by the cultural ferment of late 19th- and early 20th-century Vienna... Stunning in its breadth and depth, this is a magisterial treatment of a towering thinker * Publishers Weekly * [A] wonderful biography... Tallis attempts to redeem Freud's ""modernity"" by considering him not so much as a scientist but as an artist and a product of the weird and gorgeous bloom of creativity and neurosis that flowered in the last decades of Habsburg Vienna -- James Marriott * The Times * An accessible, fluent introduction to Freud's life and work... Tallis's book moves crisply between biographical scenes, snapshots of Vienna's golden age, retellings of Freud's significant case histories, and well-crafted summaries of Freud's principal theories * Times Literary Supplement * Tallis' clear-eyed judicious analysis is the best I've read - about the city and the man * William Boyd *