How to Be

Adam Nicolson is a prize-winning writer of many books on history, nature and the countryside including The Sea is Not Made of Water, The Making of Poetry, Sea Room, God’s Secretaries, The Gentry and the acclaimed The Mighty Dead. His 2017 book, Seabird’s Cry was picked as Waterstones Book of the Month in Scotland and won the prestigious Wainwright Prize for nature writing and the Jeffries Prize. He is the winner of the Royal Society of Literature’s Ondaatje Prize, the Somerset Maugham Award, the W.H. Heinemann Award and the British Topography Prize. He has written and presented many television series and lives on a farm in Sussex.

A TIMES BOOK OF THE YEAR ‘What links all Nicolson’s writing, though, is a tireless and tigerish sense of wonder and curiosity; a bounding willingness to immerse himself and his reader deeply in his subject: life… I’m not sure I’ve ever read a book that marries such profundity with such a sense of fun. How to Be delivers wholeheartedly on the promise of its vaunting title. It is like a net strung between the deep past and the present, a blueprint for a life well lived’ OBSERVER ‘This eminently readable tour of Greek philosophy from approximately 650 to 450 B.C. brings the ‘sea-and-city world’ of Heraclitus and Homer to life . . . [He shows] the early Greeks developed intellectual habits, chief among them the use of questioning as the basis of knowing, which laid the groundwork for Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, and for how we reason today’ NEW YORKER ‘Wise, elegant . . . richer and more unusual than [the self-help genre], an exploration of the origins of Western subjectivity’ WASHINGTON POST 'Seductive… a poetic tour of philosophical thought’ SPECTATOR ‘Passionate, poetic, and hauntingly beautiful, Adam Nicolson’s account of the west’s earliest philosophers brings vividly alive the mercantile hustle and bustle of ideas traded and transformed in a web of maritime Greek cities.. In this life-affirming, vital book, those ideas sing with the excitement of a new discovery’ David Stuttard‘It’s hard not to be dazzled by this book … No one else writes with the originality, energy and persuasiveness of Adam Nicolson. It’s like encountering the Greek sea. It takes your breath away’ Laura Beatty, bestselling author of Lost Property