is far too sceptical in her mind to accept that as a description. She teaches culture and civilisation to mature students at a university but rather than filling them with facts and knowledge to help pass exams she prefers instead to offer ideas and statements and paradoxes. She asks the students about love, history, religion and art which we the reader in turn can consider. Our narrator is one of Elizabeth’s students who takes us on a journey through time – from the start, when he and his fellow students meet Elizabeth in class, to years later, when we meet Christopher, Elizabeth’s brother and executor of her will after her passing, who bequeaths her notebooks to our narrator. As he unpacks her notebooks and remembers her uniquely inquisitive mind, her ideas unlock the philosophies of the past, and explores key events that show us how to make sense of our lives today. Underpinning them all is the story of ‘J’ - Julian the Apostate, last pagan emperor of Rome who died in AD363 and Elizabeth’s historical soulmate and fellow challenger to the institutional thinking that has always threatened to divide us. Through Barnes’ writing we are treated to a loving tribute to philosophy, a careful evaluation of history, trips to Amsterdam, celebrations of libraries and poetry and a wonderful lead character in Elizabeth Finch. This is a whip-smart novel, deeply moving and philosophical. A book about love and knowledge that invites us to think for ourselves and to understand that history is for the long haul – that it is not something inert and comatose but instead ‘active, effervescent, at times volcanic’.