Thomas W. Hodgkinson

How to Sound Cultured

by Thomas W. Hodgkinson, Hubert van den Bergh
Icon Books, December 2015

Covering such inscrutable characters as Martin Heidegger, Michel de Montaigne, Karl Popper, and Claude Lévi-Strauss (apparently not just a designer of jeans), writer Hubert van den Bergh—author of the best-selling 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.