Arranged in themed sections, the book includes specially commissioned essays by the editors and by writers with expertise in different fields - from 'Memory and Evolution' by Patrick Bateson to 'Memory and Forgetting' by the biographer Richard Holmes, and an account of the chemistry of the brain by Steven Rose.
Harriet Harvey Wood is the former Head of Literature at the British Council.
A.S. Byatt is internationally acclaimed as a novelist, short story-writer and critic. Her books include Possession (winner of the Booker Prize in 1990), and the quartet of The Virgin in the Garden, Still Life, Babel Tower and A Whistling Woman. Educated at York and Newnham College, Cambridge, she taught at the Central School of Art and Design, and was Senior Lecturer in English at University College, London, before becoming a full-time writer in 1983. She was appointed CBE in 1990 and DBE in 1999.
