Thomas W. Hodgkinson

How to Sound Cultured

by Thomas W. Hodgkinson, Hubert van den Bergh
Icon Books, December 2015
Aristophanes. 
Montaigne. 
Copernicus. 
Leibniz. 
Schopenhauer. 
Nietzsche. 
Solzhenitsyn. 

How to Sound Cultured introduces you to there and many more of the most brilliant artists and thinkers of all time, gives an astonishingly simple summary of their ideas, and suggests a casual way to mention them in conversation.

So go on. Obey the Kantian imperative of self-improvement. Escape the Kafkaesque nightmare of not knowing who Kafka was. And complete the Kierkegaardian stage transition to become a newer, more cultured-sounding version of you. Then you can dazzle and infuriate your friends in equal measure with your relentless intellectual name-dropping.