This constantly surprising, always fascinating journey through the history of knowledge and how it is passed on is a must read for anyone interested in... well, anything!! Winchester manages to weave an incredibly engaging narrative into this study which covers a huge amount of ground and history. His engaging style is a joy to read and the book is never dry or heavy despite taking on such an academic subject. There's huge riches and small anecdotes, there's massive ideas and tiny specifics, there's ancient history and new technology, there's basically everything you could want from a book on this subject! I really couldn't put it down.

An absolute dream of a book. The polymath and ever a wanderer of intellectual history, Winchester here tackles not one issue but two and three and four. He talks about what is knowledge, how we acquire it and how our understandings of it have changed. He looks at epistemology but nothing in this books is complicated, everything is presented as you'd have it - joyous story of our past, all of it in vivid colour. You won't miss the key characters, or cultures - we travel to China, to Ancient Mesopotamia and Greece, to 20th century MIT labs and beyond. Everyone should read this book but certainly if you are a lover of literature, knowledge, humanism, philosophy and culture - don't miss it. Winchester is also author of increadibly readable books about oceans, dictionaries and people. All of them come highly recommended.

I enjoy Simon Winchester books, however the text in this book is much too small, thus it is simply not readable.