The Grand Themeand Other Essays is a book of lyrical and critical essays that explores Anders Hallengren’s long-standing interest in the powerful legacy of his fellow countryman, Emanuel Swedenborg. The collection highlights Swedenborg’s diverse influence upon the fields of psychology, art, poetry, history, and music, variously describing Ralph Waldo Emerson and August Strindberg in Paris, court artists in Moscow, visionary composers in Stockholm, Surrealist poets in Mauritius, revolutionary heroes in Cuba, and Linneanists in Botany Bay.
 
The collection contains the following eight essays:
 
• “Verisimilitude and the Portrait of an Angel: On the Fortunes of a Swedish-Russian artist” (on painter Carl August Tholander)
• “The Grand Theme: A Journey in the Musical Universe” (on composer Tommie Haglund, music, and classical philosophy)
• “An Angle of Vision”(on Swedenborg’s clairvoyance)
• “The Heart of the Matter” (on Swedenborg’s influence on psychology)
• “In the Garden of God” (on Swedenborg’s and Carl Linnaeus’s influence in Australia)
• “Jardin des Plantes: The Most Important Place on Earth’” (on Swedenborg, Emerson, Strindberg, and Honoré de Balzac in Paris)
• “In the Shadow of Le Morne Brabant” (on Swedenborgianism in Mauritius)
• “The Oceanic Mind” (on Swedenborgianism in Cuba)

Anders Hallengren is a Swedish author, scholar, foreign affairs journalist, translator, and composer. He has held distinguished positions at Stockholm University and Harvard University, lecturing all around the world on diverse aspects of literature, music, and history. Hallengren has published many books in English, including his study on Emerson, The Code of Concord; a collection of essays, Gallery of Mirrors; and a revision of Carl Robsahm’s Memoirs of Swedenborg. He is internationally renowned for his Nobel Prize essay, “Nelson Mandela and the Rainbow of Culture.” In collaboration with the artist Madlen Herrström, a volume of Anders’ poems was recently published as Pentagram and, as part of the Swedish musical group Ophir, Anders received a nomination for the Manifest Music award in 2012 for the album Opus Operatum.