The best books are those that tell you what you already know, but didn’t know that you knew.—Neel Burton, psychiatrist and philosopher, University of Oxford
There is more to being human than the absence of disorder.
We live in an era of rapid change and growing uncertainty. Many of the structures that once gave us identity, meaning, and direction are being upended. Today more than ever, we must answer life’s great questions for ourselves. How should we live, love, work, suffer, and die?
I’ve been searching for answers across psychology and philosophy, literature and history, mythology and ancient wisdom—and sometimes in less obvious places, like a bottle of wine. The deepest truths often emerge where disciplines meet.
Taken together, my books amount to an education in how to think, how to live, and how not to waste your life.
I hope you find something here that speaks to you.
If you’re new here, these are good places to begin.
Old Vines, Mountain Wines, and Spain’s Garnacha Revival
Comando G’s famous Rumbo al Norte vineyard.
By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.
In the Sierra de Gredos, west of Madrid, once-neglected old bush vines are yielding some of Spain’s most compelling wines: pale, elegant Garnacha and complex, characterful whites from Albillo Real. I have a bottle of the Garnacha open beside me as I write.
The vineyards lie across three main valleys: the Alberche in the centre, the Alto Alberche to the north, and the Tiétar to the south. Both the Alberche and the Tiétar flow into the Tagus. Enormous granite boulders punctuate the landscape; Comando G’s famous Rumbo al Norte looks more like a sculpture park than a vineyard, more like Easter Island than Spain. San Martín de Valdeiglesias, Cebreros, and El Tiemblo are about an hour away from Madrid. A further hour’s drive takes you into the Alto Alberche, close to the fortress city of Ávila.
Map of the Sierra de Gredos wine region.
Near El Tiemblo stand four pre-Roman granite bulls, the Bulls of Guisando. In Don Quixote, the rival Knight of the Mirrors boasts of having lifted them at his ladylove’s command. The region’s vineyards faced a less fanciful trial. The railway brought competing wines from Valdepeñas to Madrid, while Gredos’s steep, often terraced plots were costly to work and difficult to mechanise. Rural depopulation compounded the decline, leaving many vineyards abandoned. The modern revival gathered momentum with pioneers such as Telmo Rodríguez and Pablo Eguzkiza, who bought their first Gredos vineyard in 1999. Comando G, established in 2008, brought the region to international prominence.
The Bulls of Guisando
Above the granitic bedrock, coarse sands derived from weathered granite range from a few centimetres to several metres in depth. There are also pockets of friable schist, notably around El Tiemblo. Whereas the granitic soils tend to yield fragrant, silky Garnacha, the schistous soils are associated with greater firmness and depth.
The combination of old bush vines, granite, and schist recalls another of my favourite wine regions: South Africa’s Swartland. In both places, a new generation of winegrowers recognised that vines valued chiefly for bulk production could yield wines of extraordinary distinction. If you already love Swartland, you will love Gredos.
Gredos has hot, dry summers and cold, wetter winters, with snow at higher elevations. In 2026, Spain suffered the worst wildfires in its history. When I visited the region that September, several producers reported losing two or three hectares of vines—a considerable loss for estates with only a dozen or so hectares, and one made harder, and sadder, by the age of the vines.
Summer 2026: Century-old vines reduced to ash.
In total, there are some 4,000ha of vines. Vineyards tend to be small and scattered, with many abandoned plots. Some lie above 1,000 metres, some even above 1,200, where high diurnal temperature variation helps preserve freshness and develop aromatic complexity. Yields are low, often below 30hl/ha. The dry summers and strong winds favour organic viticulture. As one winemaker told me, “It’s hard to make bad wine here.”
Despite its reputation, Gredos has no eponymous appellation—in part because the wine region straddles the provinces of Madrid, Toledo, and Ávila, each in a different autonomous community. Wines carrying a geographical designation appear under Cebreros, Méntrida, or Vinos de Madrid, or the broader Vino de la Tierra de Castilla y León. Still, qualifying wines within Cebreros may carry ‘Sierra de Gredos’ on the label.
Grenache Noir (Garnacha Tinta) accounts for some four-fifths of plantings. I found two broad styles: pale, ethereal wines driven by acidity, and the soupier kind of Grenache best left to others. The finest examples can recall the best of Burgundy, with their superfine tannins and notes of rosehip, lavender, violets, incense, thyme, and fennel—often reflecting the aromatic plants growing among the vines.
Albillo Real—not to be confused with Albillo Mayor—was once sold as a delectable table grape, but in Gredos yields some of Spain’s most serious and intriguing white wines. Its low, sprawling bush vines ripen early, and growers prize its affinity for warmth and sunshine, whereas Grenache often benefits from cooler, north-facing slopes. The examples I tasted were complex and full-bodied, with notes of honeycomb, jasmine, citrus pith, and herbs, and a saline finish. Yet in 2025, only around 50 hectares of Albillo Real were registered within the Cebreros appellation.
Barrel tasting at Bernabeleva, in San Martín de Valdeiglesias. Arroyo del Tórtolas is Juan Diez’s favourite wine, and it was mine too.
Favourite producers in Gredos include 4 Monos, Bernabeleva, Comando G, Daniel Ramos, Las Moradas, and Sotomanrique. Daniel Ramos makes his wines as naturally as possible and releases them over several years. At Las Moradas, Isabel Galindo has been making wine since 2003 and has perfected her art. My favourites at 4 Monos and Bernabeleva were the single-vineyard Molino Quemado and Arroyo del Tórtolas respectively. Sotomanrique in particular struck me as very good value for money, especially in their three single vineyard wines.
If you ever visit beautiful Gredos, the tiny Hotel Labranza in San Martín is a traditional casa de labranza (farmhouse) built in the eighteenth century—with such a soundscape, and such breezes, that I struggled to get out of bed in the mornings.
Why Intelligence and Critical Thinking Are Not Enough
Théodore Géricault, La Monomane de l’envie—or what three hours of scrolling can do to you.
By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.
We have more access to information than ever before, but the information that we see is that which is most likely to grab and hold our attention. We might wonder whether this is knowledge at all—or, in fact, the opposite of knowledge.
Fake news is not new. A year after the Battle of Actium in 31 BCE, Cleopatra sent word to Mark Antony that she had killed herself. Believing the report, Antony stabbed himself—only to discover that Cleopatra was still alive. What’s new is the speed and precision with which a falsehood can be targeted at millions.
How Manipulation Works
Manipulation seldom consists in an outright lie. Rather, it consists in controlling the picture. Each statement may be true, while the picture created by those selected statements is profoundly false.
Imagine two reporters covering the same protest. One focuses on the peaceful marchers; the other, the broken windows. One interviews the protesters; the other, the shopkeepers. Both reports may be factually accurate, and yet leave us with a misleading picture of what happened. That’s why fact-checking, though important, can only take us so far. Facts need context, proportion, and balance.
Manipulation works because we are biased. We tend to notice the information that confirms our existing beliefs while ignoring what challenges them. The first person to manipulate me is not a politician or an algorithm, but myself.
Engagement algorithms are designed in ways that exploit this. They show us not what is most true or important, but what is most likely to captivate and agitate us. Artificial intelligence then gives those selected fragments fluency and persuasive force, so that they hit harder and I am more likely to share them—thereby amplifying the message and lending it whatever credibility I may have.
How to Defend Ourselves
Whenever words give us a strong feeling before they give us a good reason, we should pause to create some mental distance. In that breathing space, we should ask: Who is speaking? What do they want from me? And what have they left out?
But most importantly, we should ask: Why do I want this to be true?
Truth requires more than intelligence. It requires qualities such as self-knowledge, humility, and justice.
Manipulation feeds us misleading fragments; truth asks us to recover the whole.
Case study: The tyrant … overhung by the sword of Damocles.
By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.
We have to recognise that we do live in an unjust world—a stupidly unjust world. Bad people often prosper, while goodness and virtue carry no guarantee of wealth, fame, power, or even security.
But prospering is not the same as flourishing. Injustice can only secure the external goods of life. Though injustice can make us wealthy and powerful, it cannot make us wise, tranquil, or contented.
The tyrant is the perfect test case of what I’m saying. The tyrant, almost by definition, is the most unjust person, seemingly enjoying the greatest possible success. Of course, not every unjust person is a tyrant, but the tyrant reveals, in its most extreme form, what injustice does to the person who practises it.
Seneca and Nero
The Stoic philosopher Seneca, who lived in the first century CE, once wrote a long letter to the tyrannical Roman emperor, Nero. In this letter, he warns Nero that the most powerful person in a tyranny may also be the least free. We don’t know whether he actually sent the letter, but a large part of it has come down to us. It’s called On Clemency. Clemency, says Seneca, is the trait that most distinguishes a king from a tyrant—and by winning admiration and loyalty, helps to keep the king safe and free. The tyrant, on the other hand, becomes the prisoner of his own power: he is hated because he is feared, and must make himself feared because he is hated. It’s a vicious cycle. In the end, he cannot travel freely or trust even his closest advisors. He cannot sleep soundly in his bed or take his meals without fearing that someone might have poisoned his food.
Few tyrants die in their own bed, and so it proved also with Nero, who ended his own life to evade capture. He did not even have the courage to wield the dagger: his freedman had to help him drive it into his throat. His final, deluded words were: Qualis artifex pereo—‘What an artist dies in me!’ Perhaps his last thought was of Seneca.
Plato’s Tyrant
If Seneca showed us the tyrant’s political prison, Plato showed us his psychological prison, the prison inside him. The tyrant’s soul is ruled by lawless appetites which he can neither control nor satisfy. Thus, the man who appears supremely free is in fact a slave to his own deranged psychology. He has conquered everyone except himself.
In Plato’s Republic, Socrates calculates, by some fanciful Platonic mathematics, that the true king is precisely 729 times happier than the tyrant!
How to Guard Against Tyrants
But philosophy cannot content itself with pointing out that the tyrant is miserable. The fate and suffering of the tyrant hardly make up for all his injustices—for all the injustices that he imposes upon others on his way up and then on his way down. That’s why we need to have much stronger safeguards against tyrants.
To guard against the rise of a tyrant, here are three things that we could do. First, we need to make sure that a career in politics remains desirable to decent people—or end up being governed only by power-hungry people. Second, we need to strengthen education so that every citizen can recognise the tyrant’s old bag of tricks. And third, we need to bolster constitutions and institutions so that they are able to arrest the rise of a would-be tyrant, no matter how insistent or popular they may be. We have put astronauts into space, invented nuclear reactors and artificial intelligence—so this, surely, is not beyond us.
Prospering vs Flourishing
So, yes, we live in an unjust world—a stupidly unjust world. Bad people prosper, while innocent people suffer. But prospering is not the same as flourishing. Only a life well lived can lead to the true goods of life: wisdom, freedom, tranquillity, contentedness. These are all internal goods which external goods may support, but can never guarantee.
But to lead a just life is not merely a winning strategy. It is also a refusal to become a part of the problem.
We Know More and More—but Understand Less and Less
Caspar David Friedrich’s Wanderer above the Sea of Fog (c. 1818). Greater perspective is the beginning of wisdom.
By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.
Wisdom begins with the willingness to hear difficult truths, especially about ourselves. Our problem is not merely that we are no wiser than our ancestors; in many ways, we are less wise.
One reason for this is that we have abandoned wisdom as an ideal. The word ‘wisdom’ appears 222 times in the Old Testament, and ‘philosophy’ in the original Greek literally means ‘the love of wisdom’. But today, anyone who speaks seriously about wisdom risks sounding grandiose or ridiculous—like me right now.
We admire intelligence, productivity, and innovation because they can be measured and monetised. Wisdom, however, is quieter, and often goes against the grain.
What Wisdom Is
Having replaced wisdom with expertise, we confuse knowing more with being wiser. But if wisdom simply amounted to knowledge, learning the name of every river and mountain in the world would make us wise, and every modern school-leaver would be wiser than a Socrates or a Seneca. Socrates was declared the wisest of men not because he knew everything, but because he understood what he did not know.
Aristotle took a different view. He said that wisdom is the understanding of causes: the wise person knows not merely that something is, but why it is. Wisdom consists in seeing the relations between things, for example, the immediate action and its distant consequences, the present moment and the shape of an entire life. It’s not so much a kind of knowledge as a way of seeing, or ways of seeing.
Why We Lack Wisdom
If wisdom is perspective, our lack of wisdom becomes easier to explain. Today, knowledge is increasingly specialised and compartmentalised. Nobody is responsible for assembling the fragments or asking what they are for. There is no job description for someone like me, who falls between the cracks—and, unfortunately, no salary either.
In addition, we suffer from an overload of information. We’re always checking our phones, flitting from fragment to fragment, living in abstract bubbles. Our ancestors may have known far less, but they were exposed to the rain and the wind: to nature, mortality, connection… to the things that can give us perspective.
Although, to be fair, our ancestors too struggled with wisdom. Wisdom derives from the Indo-European root, weid-, ‘to see’. In Norse mythology, Odin sacrifices one eye at Mimir’s well in exchange for a higher kind of vision. Later, he hangs for nine nights from the world tree, pierced by his own spear, to win the runes. That’s what wisdom demands: the courage to see what we would rather not see.
Why the Best Friends Tell us What We Least Want to Hear
‘Plato is dear, but dearer still is truth’—a saying that captures Aristotle’s willingness to disagree with his teacher in the pursuit of truth, and his conviction that genuine friendship need never fear honest disagreement.
By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.
What makes a true friend? Aristotle distinguishes friendships of utility, pleasure, and virtue—and explains why the finest friends are so rare.
Today, everyone is obsessed with romantic love. Aristotle, however, conceived of the highest human relationship in terms of friendship—the bond through which we learn to value another person for their own sake.
For the Greeks, true friendship was a rare and precious thing. In Plato’s Lysis, Socrates says, “I would rather have a real friend than all the gold of Darius [the Persian emperor], or even Darius himself.” But today, on social media, we call hundreds of people our friends.
By putting romantic love on a pedestal, we have devalued friendship. Our romantic partner is also expected to be our best friend, confidant, counsellor… As a result, other friendships may be neglected or even treated as threats.
Aristotle’s Three Kinds of Friendship
Friendship is so important to Aristotle’s account of the good life that he devotes two of the ten books of the Nicomachean Ethics to it.
Aristotle famously distinguishes between three kinds of friendship: friendships of utility, friendships of pleasure, and friendships of virtue. In a friendship of utility, we value them for what they can bring us. In a friendship of pleasure, we value them for the enjoyment they provide. These relationships are not necessarily base: colleagues, neighbours, and tennis partners may genuinely like and help one another.
But the limitation of these first two kinds of friendship lies in their reason for being: when the advantage or pleasure fades, the friendship fades with it.
Why Perfect Friends Are Rare
Lasting friendships, on the other hand, are based on character or virtue: each friend values the other, not for what he brings, but for who he is. The friend’s wellbeing and flourishing become part of our own.
Because we are invested in the wellbeing and flourishing of our friend, we owe them the hard truth—and expect the same thing in return. A real friend does not simply accept us as we are, but recognises our potential and helps us become what we could be.
That’s why “perfect friendship”, as Aristotle calls it, is not for everyone. Most people would sooner ghost us than listen to the truth about themselves—particularly now, when there are so many less demanding distractions around. Whereas social media affirms our public image, true friends challenge the person underneath.
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