'The best book ever written' Nicholas Lezard GuardianRobert Burton's labyrinthine beguiling
playful masterpiece is his attempt to 'anatomize and cut up' every aspect of the condition of
melancholy from which he had suffered throughout his life. Ranging over beauty digestion the
planets alcohol goblins kissing poetry and the restorative power of books among many other
things The Anatomy of Melancholy has fascinated figures from Samuel Johnson to Jorge Luis
Borges since the seventeenth century and remains an incomparable examination of the human
condition in all its flawed endless variety.Edited with an introduction by Angus Gowland
