The Cultural Tutor: Forty-nine Lessons You Wish You’d Learned at School

What’s the difference between Impressionism and Post-Impressionism? Is science any different to mythology? Why is the Argentinian flag blue and white?

The Cultural Tutor emerged from the depths of Twitter/X in 2022, dispensing elegant missives about poetry, paintings, classical music, architectural design and fascinating and often counter-intuitive facts about history and geography. It explored every continent, every religion, every tradition of art. In short, it was not the sort of content one usually finds on one’s newsfeeds – and yet it has flourished.

Now, the author of The Cultural Tutor, writer and blogger Sheehan Quirke, will take everything he’s learned and compile it into an all-encompassing cultural primer. The Cultural Tutor will be a rallying cry for autodidacticism and an antidote to doomscrolling, appealing to everyone from the neophyte to the ‘culture vulture’.

Structured around seven ‘pillars’ of culture, from history to architecture to art to philosophy, Sheehan will take readers on a journey from Plato to Messi, from pilasters to Brutalism. In fifty short lessons that range from provocative questions – what makes good art? – to illuminating stories – did you know the Bluetooth symbol was made up of the runic initials of the Viking king Harald Bluetooth? – he will arm the reader with a toolkit that contains everything they’ll need to begin their own ‘beautiful education’.