Areopagus Volume LXXIV

Seven short lessons every someday.

Welcome one and all to the seventy fourth volume of the Areopagus. Something different this week. People often ask me what books I would recommend. Inasmuch as I have any right to do such a thing, that is what I have chosen to do. And so, it being the Christmas Season, I offer you a metaphorical "advent calendar" of twenty four books. Some of them you may recognise from previous volumes of the Areopagus; others, I suspect, will be completely new.

The criteria for my selection was simply this: books that I have found useful in my work. In other words, if you are interested in the things I write about, these are some of the books that have helped me to write about them. And, I should add, I have endeavoured to select books that are not particularly well-known — you do not need me to recommend Dante, for example, and I have quoted Quintilian's Institutio Oratoria often enough in these pages that further recommendation is unwarranted.

Now — onwards! And where else I could turn but to Emily…