As John Carey puts it in his book What Good Are the Arts? great works of literature “do not tell you what the truth is, they make you feel what it would be like to know it”.

Often a field has one brilliant popularising specialist who can completely open it up to you. Find that person. I had always been theoretically interested in the period of late antiquity but never found a good way into the subject. Last year I discovered the work of Peter Brown who is a stunningly lucid and intelligent writer. His books The World... See more

Some of the best advice I have had is that if you really want to get your head around a topic, read two different books about it simultaneously.

As Janan Ganesh says in his piece, the best book about China is almost never called “A History of China”. He advises readers instead to seek “the universal in the particular”. Small details and anecdotes... See more