Best-selling author A. C. Grayling explains how, fuelled by original and unorthodox thinking, war and technological invention, the seventeenth century became the crucible of modernity. Covering thinkers such as Galileo, Francis Bacon, Descartes, and Newton, he shows how by the end of that tumultuous century ‘the greatest ever change in the mental outlook of humanity’ had irrevocably taken place.
