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

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Which philosopher had the maddest hairstyle Which novelist drank 50 cups of black coffee every day What on earth did Simone de Beauvoir see in Jean-Paul Sartre

How to Sound Cultured offers a wry and yet profoundly useful look inside the mirrored palaces of high culture. Covering such inscrutable characters as Heidegger, Montaigne, Kahlo and Levi-Strauss (apparently not just a designer of jeans), inscrutable polymaths Thomas W. Hodgkinson and Hubert van den Bergh - the author of the acclaimed How to Sound Clever - have done the hard work of sorting the cultural wheat from the chaff.

Read this book and you'll never again mistake Rimbaud for Rambo or Georg Lukacs for George Lucas, you'll know precisely when 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.