#138 – Toby Lester, Da Vinci’s Ghost – Leonardo da Vinci Part 27

Our guest today, Toby Lester, has worked as a refugee affairs officer for the United Nations, helped with programmes in eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, undertaken Peace Corps work in Yemen. He has written also extensively for national publications, including the Smithsonian, The Wall Street Journal, The Boston Globe, The American Scholar, The Wilson Quarterly, BBC Magazine, and the London Times. He also worked at The Atlantic in a variety of editorial capacities: including as the managing editor. Today he serves part-time as a senior editor for Harvard Business Review and edits books for writers, but he is himself a writer of two wonderful history books, The Fourth Part of the World (2009) and Da Vinci’s Ghost (2011) which is about Leonardo’s Vitruvian Man.

Om Podcasten

Starting in Florence in the 14th century, a new era began to emerge in the West. People like Petrarch, who re-discovered Cicero’s lost letters, and the new humanists - who valued the study of classical antiquity - ushered in a rebirth, or as we know it today, a “renaissance" - in the study of the arts, the sciences, philosophy, and the theatre. They rediscovered what it meant to be human.