Culture
Martin Puchner
01 February 2024
9781804182543384 pages
Synopsis
'A writer of genius' - William Dalrymple
'Remarkable' - Kwame Anthony Appiah
'Utterly captivating' - Anthony Doerr
Can anyone really own a culture? This magnificent account argues that the story of global civilisations is one of mixing, sharing, and borrowing.
It shows how art forms have crisscrossed continents over centuries to produce masterpieces. From Nefertiti's lost city and the Islamic Golden Age to twentieth century Nigerian theatre and Modernist poetry, Martin Puchner explores how contact between different peoples has driven artistic innovation in every era - whilst cultural policing and purism have more often undermined the very societies they tried to protect.
Travelling through Classical Greece, Ashoka's India, Tang dynasty China, and many other epochs, this triumphal new history reveals the crossing points which have not only inspired the humanities, but which have made us human.
'Remarkable' - Kwame Anthony Appiah
'Utterly captivating' - Anthony Doerr
Can anyone really own a culture? This magnificent account argues that the story of global civilisations is one of mixing, sharing, and borrowing.
It shows how art forms have crisscrossed continents over centuries to produce masterpieces. From Nefertiti's lost city and the Islamic Golden Age to twentieth century Nigerian theatre and Modernist poetry, Martin Puchner explores how contact between different peoples has driven artistic innovation in every era - whilst cultural policing and purism have more often undermined the very societies they tried to protect.
Travelling through Classical Greece, Ashoka's India, Tang dynasty China, and many other epochs, this triumphal new history reveals the crossing points which have not only inspired the humanities, but which have made us human.
'Eminently readable ... The book's great strength lies in its ability to swoop deftly and lightly between things that may be familiar to us in themselves, but which we might be tempted to separate out in our attempts to form a picture of the world.'Edward Wilson-Lee, The Times Literary Supplement
'A breakneck, utterly captivating survey of threads of cultural transmission-how ideas, stories, and songs-survive, change, vanish, get borrowed, refined, coopted, and grafted through time ... I underlined sentences on every page.'Anthony Doerr
'Compellingly written'Financial Times
