The uses of the past Book

Found this in the dollar bin at the Strand -- I allways wind up bying a huge stack when I get waylaid there, but this might have been the best of the bunch. Herbert's able to sum up pithily and profoundly the differences civilization and history can have on the soul -- by extrapolation, & reading into the blanks, the intrepid reader can come closer to qualifying what it is that civilzation and history do not change about us, what people like to call human nature. Theres a terrific chapter here on the historical Jesus, which puts a lot of the weirdness of the New Testament into perspective -- you have to remember that the early christians were manically apocoplyptic; naturally they'd swear of sex, marriage, or anything that might possibly be sinful when they thought the end of the world was waiting just beyond the horizon. Also a good few chapters on the classical world that put to bed of a few misconceptions I had about the time; for instance: Greek students did NOT gratify their teacher's with anal sex as popular rumor has it -- no, the sex, as it turns out, was completely femoral (!!!)