Understandably, like other alchemists, Paracelsus was wary of profane hands pawing his treasures. We might not have his recipes, but we have Ball to thank for making his life an open secret.. It is a bold adventurer who proposes to survey the history of Western civilisation in a mere 500 pages, and not only to say something fresh about many aspects of it, but to do so in a spirit of perceptive scepticism that refuses to go along with standard views and reflex valuations. Roger Osborne offers himself this challenge, and meets it brilliantly. His success rests in part on the fact that he writes lucid, accurate prose that carries heavy freights of information lightly, and in part because he knows his material and how to make telling selections from it. Moreover he keeps a steady and clear-sighted gaze on the passing show, and comments insightfully on it.

The combined result is a very good and highly educative book. That does not mean that every reader will agree with Osborne about everything. There is in particular one central theme in his argument that this reviewer will in a moment challenge. But it does mean that he offers a vivid and genuinely illuminating portrait of European (including United States) history, starting with the appearance of Homo sapiens sapiens in the continuous land-mass that then extended beyond Ireland, and ending in the uncertain and ambiguous present.Osborne's aim is to revisit the concept of civilisation itself, as standardly understood in the Western tradition. Osborne starts with President George W Bush's claim to be "defending civilisation" in the wake of the 9/11 atrocities, and asks whether the usual dual rendering of Western civilisation as "the great tradition", as our Victorian forebears saw it, and as the taming of the beast within, as Freud put it, holds water. His conclusion is that it does not; the historical narrative we like to tell ourselves is, he says, "simply not credible". The bulk of the book is the case for this claim.It is notable, but perhaps inevitable, that Osborne employs the standard stepping-stones in surveying what he would put into scare-quotes as the "growth" of Western civilisation: the appearance in Europe of modern humans 40,000 years ago, the origin of agriculture about 10,000 years ago, the coming of classical civilisation, its demise, the medieval period, the Renaissance, Reformation, Enlightenment, the horrible 20th century - each successive phase getting denser and more summary in the telling (the reign of Louis XIV gets half a page) because of the increasing volume and complexity of the material he has to deal with.In each case Osborne touches not only on wars and kings but on ideas and culture, an important point because it acknowledges - and in Osborne's telling sometimes recognises - how crucial are ideas as history's fuel. He does not say what would be better than the "belief that there are rational ways of organising the world that will bring benefit to all" - could he mean non-rational ways such as chance, or vagaries of emotion; or might he mean irrational ways such as religion, astrology, or belief in race, blood, the nation, and other myths? He simply singles out the enterprise of reason as the villain of history, and we are to take it therefore that the mistake made by previous historians is to see the increasing use of reason as humankind's rod and staff as either productive or constitutive of civilisation.Osborne's claim rests on a confusion.

Interestingly, critics might take issue with the way Osborne chooses sometimes to give ideas a motivating role and sometimes a post facto role, always a tendentious matter in the argument over the sources and causes of historical events.But one thing Osborne does that colours his account and in the end gives it its negative and sceptical cast, is to describe as an "illusion" for which he blames "every human-made catastrophe that has overtaken us" - a mightily sweeping claim - the rationalism which he (rightly) says is "the fundamental Western belief". She adds: "He was a shy person, a very unworldly person in many ways. He, more than anyone else, might have helped Kerouac navigate the rapids of new fame.As for all the brickbats that also came Kerouac's way, Johnson says he was "very, very wounded". Most nights, he turned up so drunk even his fans left disillusioned."The way he became famous was immensely disturbing to him and destructive," Johnson explains. "He did not become famous in the way he really wanted to be - to be hailed as a greatly gifted writer, that somehow he had done extraordinary things with prose Instead he became notorious.

He was this sort of cultural hero in which people invested a lot of fantasies and that was never what he wanted. He used to talk early on about the crowds of imitators and he didn't want that. And once he achieved that kind of fame, which very few writers ever achieve, it kind of cut him off from life and from his sources. It was ironic." Johnson notes that she has thought it unfortunate that Ginsberg was living in Paris at the time On the Road came out. And it was a funny thing, but he could do the most unforgivable things and yet you had to forgive him There was some innocence about him, some lack of guile.

It was very touching."Perhaps most revealing in the book is the damage that was inflicted on Kerouac by the overnight sensation of On the Road. Johnson describes a man quite unequipped to deal with the sudden attention. Nor was he ready for the torrents of often cruel criticism from conservatives in the literary establishment, who were frightened (omega) by his million-word-a-minute style. One passage of the book describes Kerouac attempting to fulfill a commitment to give nightly readings of the book at a small theatre in the West Village. Obviously, it would have been a disaster and would never have lasted." Why, you ask? "Because of the way Jack was - the attachment to his mother, the drinking, the womanising. Jack was really a very odd person." In reflecting further, she notes that if it wasn't the drink that got in her way, it was above all his mother, Gabrielle. Throughout adulthood, Kerouac repeatedly found himself drawn back to her."He was very hung up about relationships with women," Johnson adds, "which I think had an awful lot to do with his relationship with his mother.