Happy the man who develops an obsessive interest early in life that remains with him and that he can turn to constructive account. Edmund de Waal is such a man: he alighted on ceramics as a boy and they have remained the focus of his working life ever since.

To the general public, however, he is probably more known as the author of The Hare with Amber Eyes than as a ceramic artist. That book, which became a surprise bestseller throughout the world, recounted the story of one side of his family, an enormously rich pan-European banking family originating in Odessa, through the checkered fate of a collection of netsuke that he had inherited. This was not merely a family saga, but an account of the virtual destruction of an entire civilization and way of life, a theme of some of Stefan Zweig’s stories. But The Hare with Amber Eyes was more than just a lament: it was a call for people to take an interest in the history of the objects around them, and not to take them just for granted, as if they materialized only the moment we looked at them.

The author returns, somewhat tangentially, to this theme in The White Road: Journey into an Obsession, a literary macédoine, as it were, of the history of porcelain, autobiography, travelogue, and philosophy. At times it strikes me as a little precious and self-indulgent, and the use of the historical present