This volume includes some of the texts that best define Thomas de Quincey and best capture his commitment to intelligence, truth, humor and controversy. With "Judas Iscariot", an essay tremendously famous in his time, he raised blisters when questioning the apostle's wickedness. For De Quincey, Judas had been chosen by Jesus, and if he had betrayed him it was, in Borges's words, "to compel him to declare his divinity and to ignite a vast rebellion against the yoke of Rome." In "On the war", De Quincey raises the impossible end to armed conflict; "On Suicide" is a reflection on the possible justifications for that final act in light of a great poem by John Donne; finally, in "On Modern Superstition", he discusses the supposed rationality of his time (and ours) and produces a catalog as curious as it is surprising of superstitions that have died or that survive.

Judas and other essays on the divine and the human explain why Jorge Luis Borges considered De Quincey one of the sharpest and most original thinkers of any age.