A C Grayling should be available on the NHS.

Not as prescription in time of trouble, but for general distribution, to be taken neat as a vital tool for our journey towards a life well lived.

The sage and philosopher joked about the elite Shoreham audience who read Herodotus in the bath: we were the lucky ones to sit spellbound before a firework display of prodigious learning.

Here was someone on first name terms with Socrates, Plato, Confucius and the Buddha, a man who could answer questions of who we were and how we should be.

Here was a man who could make light of classical civilisation by making analogies between EastEnders and the Oresteia, someone who could privilege individual ethics before transient morality. Grayling’s gift of learning was matched by his skill as a raconteur with a lateral imagination, one peroration of which took Hazlitt’s essays through tooth fairies and ghosts.

Essays, a preferred literary form, feature in his collection Towards The Light, promoted by City Books.

It concentrates on those freedoms which he feels are under threat. It features his love of literature as one way to understand ourselves.

It will be hugely relevant and enjoyable – before or after meals.

Five stars