This is an entertaining family biography of Oxford philosophy from 1900 to 1960. Nikhil Krishnan has mined various autobiographies and reminiscences to craft a series of biographical sketches, anecdotes, and snapshots of philosophy at Oxford during the twentieth century. He has traced the connections, legacies, and disagreements among the philosophers, demonstrating how, over the years, pupils came to inherit the chairs of the professors who had trained them, passing on certain attitudes and practices, characteristic of the Oxford way of doing things.

It is also a defence of Oxford’s way of doing philosophy. Krishnan tells us how, when first tutored at Oxford, in 2007, he resented being asked, ‘Now exactly what do you mean by …?’ Coming from India, he thought of philosophy as poetic and plumbing depths. At Oxford, clarity was demanded, ‘common sense’ respected, and the ineffable distrusted. His conversion to the style culminated ‘in an affection and loyalty that are all the fiercer for having come so slowly’. He does not shy away from acknowledging Ernest Gellner’s attack on Oxford’s obsession with words rather than things or Marxist disgust at its lack of political engagement, but he wants to defend Oxford philosophy as ‘just one more stage in the slow evolution of a basically Socratic picture of philosophy, one that views philosophy as concerned with the pursuit of truth through rigorous, self-aware dialogue’.