Most Popular Books by Andrew Cunningham

A Sailor''s Odyssey is the stirring autobiography of this great fighting seaman from his boyhood in Dublin and his early career in the Navy and his service in the First World War, through his commands in the inter-war years, to the great sea battles in the Mediterranean, and then his elevation to First Sea Lord in 1943 and his subsequent responsibility for the operational policy of the Royal Navy during the later stages of the War. He attended the conferences at Casablanca, Teheran, Quebec and Yalta, and gives revealing glimpses of Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin. His was, truly, a remarkable career. This is a beautifully written and absorbing naval memoir, and it made a significant contribution to the history of the Royal Navy in the Second World War when it was first published in 1951; this new paperback edition, with an introduction by his great nephew Admiral Jock Slater, will fascinate and delight a new generation of readers and bring into focus again a great British fighting admiral.

The central proposition of this book is that the great anatomists of the Renaissance, from Vesalius to Fabricius and Harvey - the forebears of modern scientific biology and medicine - consciously resurrected not merely the methods but also the research projects of Aristotle and other Ancients. The Moderns'' choice of topics and subjects, their aims, and their evaluation of their investigations were all made in a spirit of emulation, not rejection, of their distant predecessors. First published in 1997, Andrew Cunningham’s masterly analysis of the history of the ’scientific renaissance'' - a history not of things found, but of projects of enquiry - provoked a reappraisal of the intellectual roots of the Renaissance as well as illuminating debates on the history of the body and its images.

The eighteenth-century practitioners of anatomy saw their own period as ''the perfection of anatomy''. This book looks at the investigation of anatomy in the ''long'' eighteenth century in disciplinary terms. This means looking in a novel way not only at the practical aspects of anatomizing but also at questions of how one became an anatomist, where and how the discipline was practised, what the point was of its practice, what counted as sub-disciplines of anatomy, and the nature of arguments over anatomical facts and priority of discovery. In particular pathology, generation and birth, and comparative anatomy are shown to have been linked together as sub-disciplines of anatomy. At first sight anatomy seems the most long-lived and stable of medical disciplines, from Galen and Vesalius to the present. But Cunningham argues that anatomy was, like so many other areas of knowledge, changed irrevocably around the end of the eighteenth century, with the creation of new disciplines, new forms of knowledge and new ways of investigation. The ''long'' eighteenth century, therefore, was not only the highpoint of anatomy but also the endpoint of old anatomy.

In these essays, Andrew Cunningham is concerned with issues of identity - what was the identity of topics, disciplines, arguments, diseases in the past, and whether they are identical with (more usually, how they are not identical with) topics, disciplines, arguments or diseases in the present. Historians usually tend to assume such continuous identities of present attitudes and activities with past ones, and rarely question them; the contention here is that this gives us a false image of the very things in the past that we went to look for.