An interdisciplinary collection of essays exploring the complex and conflicted topic of beauty in cultural, arts and medicine, looking back through the long cultural history of beauty, and asking whether it is possible to 'recover beauty'.

List of illustrationsAcknowledgementsNotes on the contributorsIntroduction; David Fuller, Corinne Saunders, Jane MacnaughtonPART I: MIND, BODY, SOUL1. Beautiful Ideas: The Visibility of Truth; Mark McIntosh2. Beauty, Virtue and Danger in Medieval English Romance; Corinne Saunders 3.Bathing for Beauty in the Middle Ages; Elizabeth Archibald 4. Posture is Beauty; Sander Gilman PART II: ART, IDEAS, IDEALS5. Beauty, Pain, and Violence: Through Lessing and Nietzsche to King Lear; David Fuller6. Beauty Writes Literary History: Revisiting the Myth of Bloomsbury; Patricia Waugh 7. 'Raising Sparks'; An Interview with Michael Symmons Roberts 8. 'More natural than nature, more artificial than art'; An Interview with David Bintley PART III: SURGERY, REPARATION, IMAGINATION9. 'Elegant' Surgery: The Beauty of Clinical Expertise; Jane Macnaughton 10. Portraiture, Beauty, Pain; Ludmilla Jordanova 11. War and Beauty: The Act of Unmasking in Pat Barker's Toby's Room and Louisa Young's My Dear, I Wanted to Tell You; Anne Whitehead PART IV: RESCUING BEAUTY12. Beauty in the Brain of the Beholder: Art, Neural Plasticity and Visual Pleasure; John Onians 13. The Pendulum of Taste: Architecture and the Rise of a State Aesthetic; Simon Thurley 14. Beauty and the Sacred; Roger Scruton BibliographyIndex