'How much time do I have left? A hundred days? A thousand? If I knew I was going to die next week but could be taken to see The Marriage of Figaro tonight, would I go? Absolutely.

'In a long and generously lived life, Barry Jones has been on an endless quest to share the extraordinary and the beautiful, to encourage the pursuit of an abundant life of reading and listening.

Following the publication of A Thinking Reed, he was staggered by the response to his lists of the great works that have had the most profound effect on his life and thinking. Here he expands on those lists to write about the literature and the music that have inspired him. With no claims to objectivity, he urges us to take the plunge, to rattle the bars of the cage and expose ourselves to the music of Hildegard of Bingen, Johann Sebastian Bach, Mozart and Beethoven, Mahler, Ravel and Stravinsky as well as the writings of Homer, Dante, Chaucer, Montaigne, Cervantes, Shakespeare, Sterne, Tolstoy, Proust, Joyce, and Beckett among many more.

Eagerly awaited by his many followers, The Shock of Recognition is a deeply considered, richly rewarding and often very funny journey of the mind.