What makes a good father? Advice from Aristotle, Darwin and Bob Dylan

Times

18-05-2025

This superbly intelligent book isn't, as I thought, a parenting guide. It's a sweeping, savvy history of men's notions of fatherhood, told through an entertaining series of mini-lives of eight famous males, from Aristotle to Bob (Dylan) Zimmerman. An A-Z of fathers.
But one of the many revelations in this galloping overview of patriarchy across the ages is that men have been writing parenting manuals for millennia. Carved into a 7ft phallus 4,000 years ago, the Code of Hammurabi insisted that a father's duties included making children pay for their own crimes and debts. Much later John Locke said that only men were capable of preparing children for life's hardships and urged fathers to dress their kids in thin clothes and dip their tiny feet