Evocative of an intellectual era

Wonderfully written , very well informed and presented. Elegant prose and sound judgment. A pleasure to read throughout.

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Sympathetic and wonderfully clear

I must declare an interest: I read philosophy at Cambridge from 1970; so I remember much of what he recalls. Had I only managed, back then, half his understanding of the subject, my life would have turned out very different. He brings both the individuals and their thoughts fully to life, and convinces us that it was indeed a most serious adventure. Well written, well read, I commend it warmly. I shall certainly listen to it again.

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Not an Adventure

I was hoping this would be along the same lines as the existentialist cafe, which I thoroughly enjoyed, but a lot of this book feels very insular, and at points I felt the author was speaking only to Oxford philosophy graduates and not to a wider audience. It felt like it randomly flicked through different Oxford philosophy professors without making a very good case as to why we should care about this particular philosophy professor. It’s like listening to an elderly relative that recounts endless stories about people they used to hang out with forgetting that the stories are only interesting if the person listening also knew the people, which I imagine in a sense students of philosophy might. There was too much focus on too many personalities, and the personalities were presented too ordinary to be interesting. Not enough focus on the ideas and the important differences between those ideas. Perhaps it was lost on me as a non philosopher, but that’s kind of my point, this doesn’t feel like a book for people who aren’t already philosophy graduates. Having said all that I made it to the end, so it couldn’t have been too bad, just not what I’d hoped it would be.

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