JB: I wrote a book called the Identity of Man. I never saw the cover of the English edition until the book reached me in print. And yet the artist had understood exactly what was in my mind, by putting on the cover a drawing of the brain and the Mona Lisa, one on top of the other

The Critical Response to
The Ascent of Man


THE CRITICAL RESPONSE was almost universal praise.
"...his enthusiastic intelligence comes bursting out of the screen with all its old magic."

Elkan Allen Sunday Times


"...the most colossal concept I have ever come across in television, and I doubt there is another broadcasting organisation in the world which could have undertaken it and succeeded."

Chris Dunkley Financial Times


"...a dedicated scholar disgorging beliefs and understandings which have been welling up for half a lifetime. All he had to do was to find the right form. The form, as has been widely remarked, is splendid."

Richard Last Daily Telegraph


Excerpt from Parkinson (1973) regarding filming the Ascent of Man
During 1973, when the programme was first broadcast, Bronowski was interviewed by Michael Parkinson for television (see left margin).

Since 1973, it has been broadcast in more than thirty countries.



The Ascent of Jacob Bronowski

Copyright © 2000 by Stephen Moss. All rights reserved.