Mortal Secrets

Like Sarah Bakewell's How to Live and Andrea Wulf's Magnificent Rebels , Mortal Secrets is a lively and accessible portrait of a major figure - Sigmund Freud - and the unprecedented era of creativity that shaped his ideas

Brilliantly rich and vivid

Fascinating... the best book I have read on Freud and Vienna. Lucid, sceptical, sagacious, it perfectly explains how we are all, like it or not, Freudians now

Frank Tallis's lucid storytelling makes him an ideal guide in this dangerous but perennially exciting terrain

Tallis makes Freud's life and the lost world of Viennese society vividly comprehensible. Excellent and entertaining

An unusually well-balanced and remarkably fresh account of Freud's life and work - in historical and cultural context - viewed from the perspective of our own troubled times, and with contemporary scientific hindsight

Convincingly critical and convincingly admiring-among the best of innumerable Freud bios... Tallis provides an expert portrait of a brilliant, obsessive, ruthless figure

Takes a wide-ranging and fascinating look at how Sigmund Freud shaped and was shaped by the cultural ferment of late 19th- and early 20th-century Vienna... Stunning in its breadth and depth, this is a magisterial treatment of a towering thinker

[A] wonderful biography ... Tallis attempts to redeem Freud's "modernity" by considering him not so much as a scientist but as an artist and a product of the weird and gorgeous bloom of creativity and neurosis that flowered in the last decades of Habsburg Vienna

An accessible, fluent introduction to Freud's life and work... Tallis's book moves crisply between biographical scenes, snapshots of Vienna's golden age, retellings of Freud's significant case histories, and well-crafted summaries of Freud's principal theories

Tallis' clear-eyed judicious analysis is the best I've read - about the city and the man

Dr Frank Tallis is a writer and clinical psychologist. His non-fiction books include The Incurable Romantic, The Act of Living and Mortal Secrets: Freud, Vienna and The Discovery of the Modern Mind, which was a book of the year in The Times. In the TLS William Boyd said 'Tallis' clear-eyed judicious analysis is the best I've read'. Tallis is also the author of the Liebermann Papers, a psychoanalytic detective series set in Freud's Vienna and adapted for television as the BBC drama Vienna Blood. He lives in London.