The Cultural Tutor: 49 Lessons You Wish You’d Learned at School

PAC would like to express their deepest thanks to Sheehan Quirke and Penguin Randomhouse UK for this exclusive excerpt from The Cultural Tutor: Forty-Nine Lessons You Wish You’d Learned at School.

When Xenophon Met Mulan

Water, water, every where,
And all the boards did shrink;
Water, water, every where,
Nor any drop to drink.

– Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner

In 401 BCE, a man called Cyrus, brother of the Persian king Artaxerxes III, went to Greece and raised an army of 10,000 mercenaries. They marched east and six months later arrived near Babylon. There they fought for Cyrus beside his other troops. Cyrus charged into battle and was killed. Night fell. The Greeks made camp and, next day, their leaders were invited to meet Artaxerxes. They were ambushed and killed. Back in camp, on some barren hillside, the Greeks were despondent: leaderless, a thousand miles from home, surrounded by hostile forces. They did not even light fires; they awaited their certain fate.

Among them was a young soldier called Xenophon. He could not sleep… and had a revelation:

Why am I lying here? The night advances; with the day the enemy will be upon us… but here we lie, as though it were time to rest and take our ease. I too! what am I waiting for? a general to undertake the work? and from what city? am I waiting till I am old enough? I shall never be old enough if today I do nothing.

So Xenophon gathered the officers, roused them to action, and led the Greeks over two long and arduous years back home. This expedition is retold in the Anabasis, Xenophon’s account of what happened.

His were the words I said to myself on a blustery afternoon three years ago. One moment of clear thought among a million of murk was all I needed. Xenophon’s words made sense. ‘Am I waiting till I am old enough?’ I quit my job. And, in debt to anybody who had made the mistake of lending me money, decided it was high time to pursue what I loved, hoping I could pay back my friends and family while doing it. Now I am here, writing this book – here you are, reading it.

But it was not only Xenophon who brought me the clarity of mind to begin this journey; there was also Mulan, the 1998 Disney film, that I had watched endlessly as a child. Somehow, strange and silly as it sounds, when I took off my work uniform I felt like Mulan cutting her hair before riding to war in the dead of night. Here was a rare moment: I felt free as a bird. That was the day Xenophon met Mulan – and I went along for the ride.

Why am I telling you this? Maybe, if I hadn’t read Xenophon or watched Mulan, I wouldn’t have quit. My point is: the things you watch and read have the potential to change your life and change you, for better or worse, even in the most unexpected ways. This means, of course, that we need to think very carefully about what we consume. That is the subject of this chapter.

When Europeans first met the people of South America they called them barbarians. Montaigne did not approve:

‘There is nothing barbarous and savage in this nation, by anything that I can gather, excepting, that everyone gives the title of barbarism to everything that is not in use in his own country.’

He was right – we are creatures of coincidence. Why else would I say beans on toast is a decent meal? Because I was born an Englishman. As Herodotus said: ‘Everyone without exception believes his own native customs, and the religion he was brought up in, to be the best.’ We have all been shaped by the conditions of our upbringing and the things we have consumed. But we can change, we can be radically reshaped – for good or bad – by the things we do and consume. Art, because we perceive immediately in one image what twenty books could not explain, provides wonderful examples of this.

Grant Wood, of American Gothic fame, did not always paint ‘like that’. Only a few years before 1930 (the year he painted American Gothic, taking his sister and dentist as models, transforming overnight from an Iowa dauber into an all-American superstar) Grant Wood was just another Impressionist wannabe. But in 1928 he visited Germany, saw there the paintings of a fifteenth-century artist called Hans Memling, and had an epiphany. Gone were the blurred lines of Impressionism; in came the smooth finish of the Netherlandish Renaissance. This was a total transformation in his style (and, afterwards, his life) – all because he happened to see the paintings of Hans Memling.

Vincent Van Gogh. Three words that call to mind vivid and swirling colours. But Van Gogh did not always paint that way; his art from before 1886 is unrecognisable. What changed? He went to Paris and saw the impasto flowers of Adolphe Monticelli and the bright colours of Paul Gauguin. A door, previously invisible to him, had opened – and he flung himself through it.

There would be no Hamlet but for Shakespeare having read François de Belleforest’s translation of Saxo Grammaticus’ *Gesta Danorum*, nor any Coriolanus without Plutarch or Thomas North having translated Plutarch and Shakespeare having read North. History, too, is shaped by coincidences of consumption. Had not Charlemagne seen in Ravenna the mosaics of San Vitale showing the Emperor Justinian, he might never have been inspired to preserve and spread surviving works of antiquity, nor to build his own palace or have himself declared Holy Roman Emperor. It turns out you need only visit a certain building to change your life.

Sheehan Quirke is a writer who lives in England. In May 2022 he quit his job and started The Cultural Tutor on Twitter (now X) with the aim of democratising elite knowledge. Since then, he has amassed over 1.7 million followers who include world famous personalities across the cultural and political spectrum, from James O’Brien to Jordan Peterson and Professor Alice Roberts to Steven Bartlett. He also writes a fortnightly newsletter with over 75,000 readers that features seven short lessons on art, architecture, poetry, and music.

His latest title is The Cultural Tutor: 49 Lessons You Wish You’d Learned at School.