A Weak Way In

Book One of Marcus Aurelius's Meditations reads like a string of thank-you notes, and Derren Brown thinks it might be the weakest possible way into a great book. He suspects a later editor grafted this private catalogue of debts onto the front of the whole collection, long after Marcus wrote the rest of it. Brown reads past the flat form anyway and finds an emperor building his own portrait entirely out of other people's virtues, never once claiming credit for his own. Along the way he tries the exercise himself, and turns up an old teacher and a university friend nobody else would think to thank.