Anita Albus Paradies und Paradox (Paradise and Paradox) Eichborn, November 2002. 320pp. ISBN 3-8218-4522-8 Here is a collection of twelve sparkling essays, encompassing themes from the sixteenth to the twentieth century, juxtaposing disciplines from art to alchemy and belles lettres to botany, and relating each subject to the circumstances of his, or its, age. Herself an artist as well as a writer and translator, Albus combines authority with infectious eloquence. Who said erudition and scholarship have to be dull? One of the book's most startling and least known personalities, at least for most readers, is likely to be the extraordinary Guillaume Postel, mystic, religious leader and linguist. He wrote works in more than twelve languages, compiled the first Arabic grammar, translated widely, including the cabbalistic bible, the Sohar, and spent several months in the prisons of the Inquisition. Moving on to the eighteenth century, another of the author's stars is the Swedish pastor's son Carl von Linné, better known under his Latinised name of Linnaeus, a conspicuous lecher as well as an outstanding botanist, to whom we owe our modern method of classifying plants. Then on to the Goncourt brothers, arch bookmen and bibliophiles, whose collecting mania the author attributes to their disgust with the growth of nineteenth-century industrialism. Even such well-known and much-studied figures as Proust and Nabokov spur Albus to fresh insights. She analyses the implications of Nabokov's early nom-de-plume, 'Sirin', and suggests reasons why the paintings of Vermeer figure so strongly in A la recherche du temps perdu. In most of her discussions she is less concerned with whether or not her subjects were 'right' as to how they achieved their knowledge or insights and fought for their beliefs in times as tense and prejudiced as our own. Dedicated to Lévi-Strauss (a champion of Albus’s paintings) and equally at home in all the periods over which it ranges, this book will have wide appeal. Beautifully designed and illustrated, it is also a credit to the fine series to which it belongs.