Assigning such importance to place is a characteristic move for Mr. Nicolson, an elegant and erudite British writer ... He has set himself a difficult task ... Winning enthusiasm ... Teaches many lessons, but most of all that we should savor the strange and stimulating legacy of this lesser-known era.
Despite the book’s New Agey title and a halfhearted conclusion, which attempts to reframe the preceding chapters as nuggets of lifestyle advice...in truth Nicolson’s book has little to do with the self-help genre. It is richer and more unusual than that.
Nicolson continues his imaginative engagement with the ancient world, diving deeper into the lives of the pre-Socratic philosophers ... The idea of the harbour mind is a brilliant one and convincingly joins together disparate thinkers with vastly differing approaches to the great questions of life ... Structured to make its didactic purpose clear: Nicolson wants to bring these ancient thinkers into the present moment, to make a radical claim for their contemporary relevance ... In other hands this formulaic populism might be tawdry, but Nicolson writes this stuff with a twinkle in his eye. I’m not sure I’ve ever read a book that marries such profundity with such a mischievous sense of fun.
