There was a wonderful, revelatory moment in Adam Nicolson’s last book, Life Between the Tides, where he suddenly telescoped out from the Scottish rock pool he was describing in order to meditate on the work of the pre-Socratic philosopher Heraclitus, demonstrating how much we can still learn about our present-day world by turning to the great minds of the past. This dazzling passage of writing argued that engagement with the environment is always a philosophical act, and that the close looking of the naturalist is more similar than we might think to the work of the philosopher. As with his 2019 book about a year in the lives of the Romantic poets, The Making of Poetry, this chapter about Heraclitus showed Nicolson at his illuminating, energetic best – scholarly without being schoolbookish, aware of the role that brilliant minds, well harnessed, can play in enlarging and enriching our appreciation of life.
It feels like that chapter was the launchpad for Nicolson’s latest book, How to Be, which is an elevated sort of self-help book about the origins of western philosophical thought. It is Nicolson’s 25th book in a career spanning 40 years and an array of genres – early in his 60s, he even turned his hand to fiction and was longlisted for the Sunday Times audible short story award. What links all his writing, though, is a tireless and tiggerish sense of wonder and curiosity; a bounding willingness to immerse himself and his reader deeply in his subject: life.
