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|summary=Using history to answer the ancient question ‘how should we live’, Roman Krznaric’s fascinating book is both erudite and readable. A delight.

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Krznaric approaches each topic head on, examining how we live our lives now and selecting a number of people or periods from the past to illustrate how things were different and could be again. So, for instance, when he writes about love he criticises the barren crudeness of the single word ‘love’ which we now use to express every aspect of the emotion. He contrasts us with the Greeks who distinguished between six different types of love, from ‘eros’ (the passionate loss of control we might call ‘madly in love’) to ‘philia’ (the love between friends) or ‘pragma’ (the mature love of a long-term relationship). Today’s obsessive search for the ‘soul mate’, perpetuated by the media and Hollywood, places, he claims, undue pressure on one person to fulfil all the different aspects of love.