Such was the feeling that Henri Bergson's famous public lectures at the College de France were 'an event' that they were taken down word for word by Charles Péguy's stenographers.

Throughout the lectures Bergson, almost as famous for his oratorical prowess as his philosophical works, brought together his two most impressive attributes: a capacity for truly original thinking and an uncanny ability to hold a crowd's attention. The lectures were a self-styled introduction to his work, and are a brilliant initiation to Bergson for readers today. We hear, for example, how the work of philosophers from Plato, Aristotle, and Plotinus to Descartes, Leibniz and Kant shaped his famous writings on creation and process and how he began thinking in his distinctively evolutionary way.

These lectures were lost, presumed destroyed, for decades. Under Frederic Worms meticulous direction, these hitherto unread philosophies of this Nobel prize winning writer have now come to light.