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David Russell's Top Book Recommendations

Want to know what books David Russell recommends on their reading list? We've researched interviews, social media posts, podcasts, and articles to build a comprehensive list of David Russell's favorite book recommendations of all time.

1
At once autobiographical and psychoanalytic, The Hands of the Living God, first published in 1969, provides a detailed case study of Susan who, during a 20-year long treatment, spontaneously discovers the capacity to do doodle drawings.



An important focus of the book is the drawings themselves, 150 of which are reproduced in the text, and their deep unconscious perception of the battle between sanity and madness. It is these drawings, linked with Milner's sensitive and lucid record of the therapeutic encounter, that give the book its unique and compelling...
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Recommended by David Russell, and 1 others.

David RussellBy communicating through drawing, the psychoanalyst Milner and a very unwell woman named Susan approach fundamental questions about what it feels like to be in the world. (Source)

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2

The Renaissance

Studies in Art and Poetry

'To burn always with this hard gemlike flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life.'

The Renaissance (1873) at once became the touchstone for the decadent imagination for a generation of Oxford undergraduates. Pater was shocked at the reaction his book inspired: 'I wish they would not call me a hedonist, it gives such a wrong impression to those who do not know Greek.'.

The book had begun as a series of idiosyncratic, impressionistic critical essays on those artists that embodied for him the spirit of the Renaissance; by collecting them and adding his...
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Recommended by David Russell, and 1 others.

David RussellThrough these portraits, Pater offers us a whole sensibility—a way of appreciating the world. (Source)

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3

Selected Essays, Poems and Other Writings

The works collected in this volume provide an illuminating introduction to George Eliot's incisive views on religion, art and science, and the nature and purpose of fiction. Essays such as 'Evangelical Teaching' show her rejecting her earlier religious beliefs, while 'Woman in France' questions conventional ideas about female virtues and marriage, and 'Notes on Form in Art' sets out theories of idealism and realism that she developed further in Middlemarch and Daniel Deronda. It also includes selections from Eliot's translations of works by Strauss and Feuerbach that challenged many ideas... more
Recommended by David Russell, and 1 others.

David RussellGeorge Eliot is one of the great intellectuals of British history. It took a great deal of intellect and moral courage to move to try and make her way in London as a single woman in the field of journalism. (Source)

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4
This edition establishes the authoritative text of one of the most celebrated works of social criticism written. It also includes a chronology of Arnold's life, a bibliographical guide and full notes on the names and historical events mentioned in the texts. less
Recommended by David Russell, and 1 others.

David RussellThis book shows that Arnold thought deeply about the forces in our culture that could democratize anybody’s ordinary creative experience. (Source)

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5

Selected Prose

This selection brings together the best prose writings of the great early nineteenth-century essayist Charles Lamb, whose shrewd wit and convivial style have endeared him to generations of readers. These pieces include early discussions of Hogarth and Shakespeare; masterly essays written under the pen-name 'Elia' that range over such subjects as drunkenness, witches, dreams, marriage and the joy of roast pig; and letters to Lamb's circle of contemporaries, among them Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth. Wryly amused by the world, allusive, searching and endlessly inventive, these... more
Recommended by David Russell, and 1 others.

David RussellFor all their irony, or rather through their irony, I came to find in Lamb’s essays a suggestive alternative to major questions of social life that were circulating around the same time as the writings of the Utilitarians. (Source)

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