James Geary | The World in a Phrase: a brief history of the aphorism
Sat 25 Apr 2026 | 10:00am - 11:00am
‘Don’t judge a book by its cover.’ The oldest written art form on the planet, aphorisms have been going viral for thousands of years. James Geary’s bestseller The World in a Phrase tells the story of the aphorism through some of its greatest practitioners, including the Buddha, Nietzsche, George Eliot, James Baldwin, Audre Lorde and David Byrne. Join James for an entertaining tour through the world’s wisest and wittiest sayings.
Venue: Palmerston Room
Duration: 1 hour
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Author Biography
James Geary is also the author of Wit’s End: What Wit Is, How It Works, and Why We Need It (W.W. Norton), I Is an Other: The Secret Life of Metaphor and How It Shapes the Way We See the World (HarperCollins), and Geary’s Guide to the World’s Great Aphorists (Bloomsbury). He is an Adjunct Lecturer in Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School, the former deputy curator of the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard, and the former editor of the European edition of Time magazine.
