These are tangled beginnings, more a meshwork than a network, one lattice of interactivity laid over another in a rösti of connectedness, but a pattern can be made out within them: the Greeks would draw on the ancient, inherited learning of Egypt and Mesopotamia; set it in the frame of an adventurous and disruptive approach to life; and then look for a third term, neither wedded to autocratic power nor merely interested in a piratical free-for-all, but seeking what might be called the inventively civic, forms of life and understanding that depended neither on arbitrary authority nor on anarchic violence but were forever in search of the middle ground of social and personal justice, looking for, if perhaps never quite finding, the shared understanding of the three connected realms of soul, city and cosmos that would come to define them.

This brief history is the soil in which the seed of early philosophy began to grow: the fraying of ancient, imperial control; the eruption of an unregulated stimulus in the sea-based freebooters; the development by them of trading networks which ran the length of the Mediterranean; and, as a product of those networks, the growth of merchant cities, first among the Phoenicians and then, after about 800 when Phoenician autonomy began to shrink under renewed pressure from the neo-Babylonian empire to the east, the emergence of the Greek cities into their own years of potency. 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 - Different forms of a palace economy ruled this core of the Bronze Age world. In Anatolia, the Hittite empire played its part as one of these near-eastern power blocs. In Crete, the palace-temples of the Minoans drew on Egyptian and Mesopotamian models, commanding a sea-based empire stretching up into the Aegean and west towards Italy. The warrior-kings at Mycenae in mainland Greece were first the acolytes and then imitators of the Cretans, and after about 1450 BC their conquerors. Where the rest of Europe and most of western Asia remained divided into low-tech, small-scale chiefdoms, these sophisticated literate empires looked as if they could last for eternity.

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Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil. Hugely formative ideas emerged in these harbour-cities: fluidity of mind, the search for coherence, a need for the just city, a recognition of the mutability of things, a belief in the reality of the ideal -- all became the Greeks' legacy to the world.

In How to Be, Adam Nicolson takes us on a glorious, immersive journey. Grounded in the belief that places give access to minds, however distant and strange, this book reintroduces us to our earliest thinkers through the lands they inhabited. To know the mental occupations of Homer or Heraclitus, one must visit their cities, sail their seas, and find landscapes not overwhelmed by the millennia that have passed but retain the atmosphere of that ancient life. Nicolson, the award-winning author of Why Homer Matters, uncovers ideas of personhood with Sappho and Alcaeus on Lesbos; plays with paradox in southern Italy with Zeno, the world’s first absurdist; and visits the coastal city of Miletus, burbling with the ideas of Thales and Anaximenes. This book takes the reader on an epic journey through the origins of Western thinking. It was a delightful discovery while browsing the offerings of netgalley and I just loved all those little gems of insight Nicolson accumulated and put into a vision which painted a very vivid picture of the origins of the way Western thinking emerged.

To imagine large geopolitical change as human experience is difficult, partly because it occurs on a far from personal scale and over time spans that stretch beyond the individual life. And we cannot think of ourselves as epiphenomena, bubbles on the surface of a much larger stream. But the sources of philosophy were not merely brilliant individuals nor chance happenings. It can be seen in retrospect to have emerged from the intersection of three culture-worlds in the eastern Mediterranean about 3,000 years ago. The meeting of the western limits of Asia, the northern shore of Africa in Egypt and the braided and tasselled fringe of southern Europe gave rise to what we now see as the beginnings of western thought. In How to Be, Nicolson continues his imaginative engagement with the ancient world, diving deeper into the lives of the pre-Socratic philosophers – some of whom you may know: Pythagoras, Heraclitus (“You can’t step into the same river twice”) and Zeno. Others have been more or less forgotten: Anaximenes, Xenophanes and Archilochus. All of these thinkers, Nicolson argues, are linked not only by their common place in space and time – between around 800 and 450BC in Megale Hellas (Greater Greece) – but also by the fact that they shared what he calls a “harbour mind”. 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, where men and women first questioned the nature of the universe and established what it is to be human. In this life-affirming, vital book, those ideas sing with the excitement of a new discovery” - David Stuttard I’m not sure I’ve ever read a book that marries such profundity with such a mischievous sense of fun . . . [ How to Be] is like a net strung between the deep past and the present, a blueprint for a life well lived.” —Alex Preston, The Observer

We haven’t yet spoken of Homer and his tremendous influence. You write about the Iliad as an outwardly-directed text in that, there, life is a field of play for the gods, a proving ground of suffering for men, as opposed to the inward-directed environments of Sappho’s lyric poetry, Archilochus and Alcaeus’s observations of life spoken from the complex interior lives of men and women. In other words, from the subjective perspective instead of the cosmically objective perspective. An old friend of yours, Wordsworth, would put this as “a grandeur in the beatings of the heart.” The Bronze Age ended, say, around 1100 BCE with this extraordinary collapse of the great empires in Mesopotamia and Eastern Turkey, the Hittites, the Egyptians, the Minoans, the Mycenaeans, that world of rigid hierarchies and palace-based cultures. Their essential movement was centripetal, dragging people and resources towards the grand monarchical center. This was both a model of life on earth and of the cosmos. A central god-king dominated culture, and it all collapsed for whatever reason. We really don’t know why. Then, the Dark Ages, although historians don’t like that term anymore. Writing, metalwork, even those great palaces disappear, and a wild, bandit-world emerges. In time, nascent city-states—not on the modern-day Greek mainland but largely on the Aegean shores of modern-day Turkey—develop and you have the emergence of a particular isolated, self-sufficient mercantile power center without a dominating monarchy.

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Hugely formative ideas emerged in these harbour-cities: fluidity of mind, the search for coherence, a need for the just city, a recognition of the mutability of things, a belief in the reality of the ideal — all became the Greeks’ legacy to the world.

He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.

This book offers a sweeping view of the birth of Western philosophy. For me, it was too much. I never got a good sense of what the book was about. It's a ton of information. It's good information, and it's interesting. It just didn't feel coherent to me. It didn't seem to be telling a story. Maybe it wasn't supposed to, but the human mind responds better to stories than to disarticulated facts. How to Be is structured to make its didactic purpose clear: Nicolson wants to bring these ancient thinkers into the present moment, to make a radical claim for their contemporary relevance. Not only is each chapter structured around a specific question – How to Be Me? Does Love Rule the Universe? Can I Live Multiple Realities? – the book even ends with a staple of the self-help genre: a list of takeaways that can be deployed in modern life for the time-pressed executive wanting key learnings. In other hands this formulaic populism might be tawdry, but Nicolson writes this stuff with a twinkle in his eye. I’m not sure I’ve ever read a book that marries such profundity with such a mischievous sense of fun. The modern frontier between Greece and Turkey now divides these two places – at night you can look out across the channel from Erythrae in Turkey to the lights of Chios on the Greek side, the red pinpoints of its wind turbines on the ridge above them, and the lanterns of the fishing boats catching squid and mullet in the channel between. It is one of the narrow crossings between Asia and the European Union which in the twenty-first century has seen thousands of refugees from Asian wars attempt to find a new life in Europe, and where many have died.