What is a good human life? A life of duty? Virtue? Happiness? This book weaves a path through traditional answers. We live well, suggests the author, not primarily by pursuing goods for ourselves, but by cherishing other people and guiding them towards lives of cherishing. We cherish objects too - the planet, my grandfather's watch - and practices like music-making to which we are personally drawn. In this work of `populated philosophy' (copiously illustrated by literary and `real life' examples), a cherishing life is presented as hard and irreducibly individual. The idea of cherishing, says...