Covering such inscrutable characters as Martin Heidegger, Michel de Montaigne, Karl Popper, and Claude Lévi-Strauss (apparently not just a designer of jeans), writer Hubert van den Bergh—author of the best-selling How to Sound Clever—and journalist Thomas W. Hodgkinson offer you a wry look inside the mirrored palaces of high culture.

Read this book and you'll never again mistake Hegel for Engels, you'll know when precisely to drop Foucault's name into a conversation and how to pronounce "Borgesian," and you'll learn many more essential pointers for the intellectual life.