Robert Ferguson

Soren Kierkegaard was a Danish philosopher, theologian, poet, social critic and religious author. Born in 1813 in Copenhagen, his philosophical work addressed living as a single individual and the importance of personal choice and commitment. A famously fierce critic of the idealist thinkers of his time, he is regarded as the first existentialist philosopher. Here you will find extracts from his greatest works. The Life Lessons series from The School of Life takes a great thinker and highlights those ideas most relevant to ordinary everyday dilemmas. These books emphasise ways in which wise voices from the past have urgently important and inspiring things to tell us. This book is introduced and edited by Robert Ferguson, author of the Viking history The Hammer and the Cross and two Danish novels. He is a novelist, biographer, dramatist and historian.

Life Lessons from Kierkegaard

Presents a history of the Nordic warriors and explorers that plundered and traded their way across Europe, and discusses how ultimately their violence and conquests helped spread and enhance accomplishments in the arts, culture and government.

A History

The Vikings

Scandinavia is the epitome of cool: we fill our homes with Nordic furniture; we envy their humane social welfare system and their healthy outdoor lifestyle; we glut ourselves on their crime fiction; even their strangely attractive melancholia seems to express a stoic, commonsensical acceptance of life's vicissitudes. But how valid is this outsider's view of Scandinavia, and how accurate our picture of life in Scandinavia today? Scandinavians follows a chronological progression across the Northern centuries: the Vendel era of Swedish prehistory; the age of the Vikings; the Christian conversions of Denmark, Norway, Sweden and Iceland; the unified Scandinavian state of the late Middle Ages; the sea-change of the Reformation; the kingdom of Denmark-Norway; King Gustav Adolphus and the age of Sweden's greatness; the cultural golden age of Ibsen, Strindberg and Munch; the impact of the Second World War; Scandinavia's postwar social democratic nirvana; and the terror attacks of Anders Behring Breivik. Scandinavians is also a personal investigation, with award-winning author Robert Ferguson as the ideal companion as he explores wide-ranging topics such as the power and mystique of Scandinavian women, from the Valkyries to the Vikings; from Nora and Hedda to Garbo and Bergman. This digressive technique is familiar from the writings of W. G. Sebald, and in Ferguson's hands it is deployed with particular felicity, accessibility, and deftness, richly illuminating our understanding of modern Scandinavia, its society, politics, culture, and temperament.

In Search of the Soul of the North

Scandinavians

Great Thinkers on Modern Life

Kierkegaard

T.E. Hulme was one of the leading lights of the imagist movement in British verse, he counted among his friends and literary companions Wyndham Lewis, Ezra Pound, Walter Sickert and Rupert Brooke. At the outbreak of war he joined the British Army and was killed in 1917 at the age of 34.

The Short Sharp Life of T.E. Hulme

Kierkegaarddan Hayat Dersleri

The School of Life

'The School of Life offers radical ways to help us raid the treasure trove of human knowledge' Independent on Sunday Soren Kierkegaard was a Danish philosopher, theologian, literary stylist and social critic. Born in 1813 in Copenhagen, his philosophical work addressed living as a single individual and the importance of personal choice. A famously fierce critic of the idealist thinkers of his time, he is regarded as the first existentialist philosopher. Here you will find insights from his greatest works. The Life Lessons series from The School of Life takes a great thinker and highlights those ideas most relevant to ordinary, everyday dilemmas. These books emphasize ways in which wise voices from the past have urgently important and inspiring things to tell us. 'thoroughly welcoming and approachable ... [Robert Ferguson] communicates strongly his enthusiams, indeed his love, for this Manichean of the north, and writes of him beautifully ... If the six books in the Life Lessons series can teach even a few readers to pay passionate heed to the world - to notice things - they will have been an unquestionable success' John Banville, Prospect 'there is a good deal to be learned from these little primers' Observer

Life lessons from Kierkegaard

Turf-roofed and wooden-built, offering fresh clean air, peace, isolation and the promise of a day's wood-chopping, hiking or snow-clearing amid amid landscapes of great beauty, the hytte – or wooden cabin home – is a crucial part of the national identity of every Norwegian. In 2016, Robert Ferguson and his wife bought a piece of land high up in the Hardangervidda, the plateau that dominates south-central Norway, and on it they built such a hytte. For Ferguson, the hytte represented the realisation of a dream that first brought him to Norway from England more than thirty years ago. As the cabin takes shape he learns, through conversations with friends and cabin-builders, the cultural history of modern Norway. He learns of the changing traditions attached to these cabin homes for native Norwegians as they try to marry their new-found urban affluence to their past as a tight-knit, impoverished rural community-nation. Along the way he also describes the intense and mutually rewarding relationship that arose between the colonial Norwegians and their wealthy, imperialist British neighbours across the North Sea in the 19th and 20th centuries; how the British 'salmon-lords' showed them another way of looking at their great rivers, and how English climbers introduced them to a new way of thinking about their mountains.

A Norwegian Odyssey

The Cabin in the Mountains

The Dialect of Cumberland

A comprehensive and thrilling history of the Vikings for fans of the History Channel series From Harald Bluetooth to Cnut the Great, the feared seamen and plunderers of the Viking Age ruled Norway, Sweden, and Denmark but roamed as far as Byzantium, Greenland, and America. Raiders and traders, settlers and craftsmen, the medieval Scandinavians who have become familiar to history as Vikings never lose their capacity to fascinate, from their ingeniously designed longboats to their stormy pantheon of Viking gods and goddesses, ruled by Odin in Valhalla. Robert Ferguson is a sure guide across what he calls "the treacherous marches which divide legend from fact in Viking Age history." His long familiarity with the literary culture of Scandinavia with its skaldic poetry is combined with the latest archaeological discoveries to reveal a sweeping picture of the Norsemen, one of history's most amazing civilizations. Impeccably researched and filled with compelling accounts and analyses of legendary Viking warriors and Norse mythology, The Vikings is an indispensable guide to medieval Scandinavia and is a wonderful companion to the History Channel series.

For those living outside Scandinavia, the Viking Age effectively began in 793 with an attack on the monastery at Lindisfarne. The attack on Lindisfarne was a characteristically violent harbinger of what was in store for Britain and much of Europe from the Vikings for the next 300 years, until the final destruction of the heathen temple to the Norse gods at Uppsala around 1090. Robert Ferguson is a sure guide across what he calls 'the treacherous marches which divide legend from fact in Viking Age history'. His long familiarity with the literary culture of Scandinavia - the eddas, the poetry of the skalds and the sagas - is combined with the latest archaeological discoveries and the evidence of picture-stones, runes, ships and objects scattered all over northern Europe, to make the most convincing modern portrait of the Viking Age in any language. The Hammer and the Cross ranges from Scandinavia itself to Kievan Rus and Byzantium in the east, to Iceland, Greenland and the north American settlements in the west. Beyond its geographical boundaries the book takes us on a journey to a misty region inhabited by Hallfred the Troublesome Poet, Harald Bluetooth, Ragnar Hairy-Breeches, Ivar the Boneless and Eyvind the Plagiarist, in which literature, history and myth dissolve into one another.

A New History of the Vikings

The Hammer and the Cross

Peter T. Coleman

Making Conflict Work: Harnessing the Power of Disagreement

The History of the Revolution

Robert Ferguson, MS, Cn

Bohemian, egoist and prophet of sensualism, Henry Miller remains to many writers and readers a literary lion. Born in Brooklyn in 1891, son of a tailor of German extraction, Miller would embrace a freewheeling existence that carried him through umpteen jobs and sexual encounters, providing rich source material for the novels he would write. Greenwich Village and Paris in the 1920s offered rich pickings, as did Miller's ten-year affair with Anais Nin. But he was 69 before "Tropic of Cancer" was legally published in the US and made him famous, almost 30 years from its composition and long after his peers had devoured it in contraband French editions. Robert Ferguson reveals Miller as a amalgam of vulnerability and insouciance, who endured thirty years of official opprobrium but won the respect of Orwell, T.S. Eliot and Lawrence Durrell, and readers by the thousand. 'This impressive biography [is] good, dirty fun.' "Observer" 'Engaging and perceptive.' "Economist" 'Lively and entertaining.' J.G. Ballard

Henry Miller

Life Lessons From Kierkegaard

The River-names of Europe

This biography of one of the twentieth century's most important and neglected writers captures the restless and enigmatic spirit of Hamsun and provides a major reassessment of his work

Robert Ferguson

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