The Quiet Before - On the unexpected origins of radical ideas

''The Quiet Before is a fascinating and important exploration of how ideas that change the world incubate and spread.'' Steven Pinker

''Filled with insightful analysis and colourful storytelling... Rarely does a book give you a new way of looking at social change. This one does.'' Walter Isaacson

Why do some radical ideas make history?

We tend to think of revolutions as loud: frustrations and demands shouted in the streets. But the ideas fuelling them have traditionally been conceived in much quieter spaces, in the small, secluded corners where a vanguard can imagine alternate realities. This extraordinary book is a search for those spaces, over centuries and across continents, and a warning that they might soon go extinct.

The Quiet Before is a grand panorama, stretching from the seventeenth-century correspondence that jump-started the scientific revolution to the encrypted apps used by epidemiologists fig