The Hampstead Letters‪,‬

On the last Saturday before London's 2020 lockdown, retired constitutional lawyer David Brenner discovers a red leather box at Portobello Road. Inside: six letters in Latin, dated 1665-1666, bearing the signatures of Thomas Hobbes and Benedict de Spinoza—two of history's greatest philosophers who, according to all records, never corresponded.
As pandemic isolation descends, David begins translating the impossible correspondence. The letters reveal an urgent debate about sovereignty and freedom, religious authority and individual conscience, democracy and power—questions as pressing in plague-stricken 2020 as they were in 1665.
But are the letters genuine? And does it matter?
Through David's year-long journey—from grief and purposelessness to intellectual renaissance—The Hampstead Letters explores how we balance liberty and security in times of crisis, how technology manipulates democratic choice, and whether human reason can overcome passion and fear. Moving between seventeenth-century philosophy and contemporary politics, between Cambridge Analytica and the Great Plague, between Vermeer's luminous paintings and Purcell's haunting music, this is a novel about the enduring questions that connect all human ages.
A meditation on loss, learning, and the conversations that shape civilization.

______
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Copyright Notice: Textual Sources and Permissions
The works of Thomas Hobbes and Benedict de Spinoza cited in this novel are in the public domain. Quotations from Leviathan (1651), Tractatus Theologico-Politicus (1670), Ethics (1677), and Tractatus Politicus (1677) have been drawn from various scholarly editions and translations. Where specific modern translations are quoted, every effort has been made to acknowledge the translators. The imagined correspondence between Hobbes and Spinoza is a work of fiction, created by the author as a philosophical and literary exercise. Any resemblance to actual unpublished correspondence is entirely coincidental.
Acknowledgment of AI Assistance
This novel was written in collaboration with Claude (Anthropic), an AI assistant. The philosophical framework, historical research, character development, and narrative structure emerged from an iterative dialogue between human creativity and artificial intelligence. This collaborative process—exploring seventeenth-century philosophy through twenty-first-century technology—embodies one of the novel's central themes: how tools and methods shape thought, and how genuine inquiry transcends the means by which it is conducted. The author takes full responsibility for the final work.