How to Sound Cultured: Master The 250 Names That Intellectuals Love To Drop Into Conversation

(Hardback)

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Description

When you hear the name Rimbaud, do you think of Sylvester Stallone Covering such inscrutable characters as Heidegger, Montaigne, Popper and Levi-Strauss (apparently not just a designer of jeans), writer Hubert Van Den Bergh - author of the bestselling How to Sound Clever - and journalist Thomas W. Hodgkinson offer you a wry look inside the mirrored palaces of high culture.

Read this book and you'll never again mistake Hegel for Engels, you'll know when precisely to drop Foucault's name into a conversation and how to pronounce 'Borgesian', and you'll learn many more essential pointers for the intellectual life.

Reviews

Damn, all my cheating secrets revealed. In book form -- Stephen Fry
This admirable book is a wholly welcome antidote to the semi-demi-literacy of the 21st century. Go out and buy it! * Colin Dexter on How to Sound Clever *
Terrific. With almost miraculous concision, they combine biographical information and often quite bracing judgments with jokes, some great quotations and lots of arresting little facts. * Daily Mail *

Author Bio

Hubert van den Bergh is the author of How to Sound Clever (Bloomsbury, 2010). He has written for The Daily Telegraph and The Guardian and appeared on Vanessa Feltz's BBC Radio 2 show.Thomas W. Hodgkinson is the author of the novel Memoirs of a Stalker (Silvertail, 2015). He writes regularly for The Spectator and the Daily Mail, and is a contributing editor at The Week.