De Waal’s lauded memoir of last year, ‘The Hare with Amber Eyes’, traces the fate of a Jewish banking family across Europe through a collection of 250 Japanese ‘netsuke’, or miniature sculptures. ‘The Pot Book’ approaches ceramics in an apparently contradictory way. A select several hundred pots, created over a wide framework of time and place, are placed in alphabetical order – apparently signifying a less imaginative and more mundane approach.

Yet it is through this apparently orderly arrangement that ‘some wonderful serendipitous juxtapositions’ are created, in the author’s words. Grayson Perry’s critiques of contemporary life are placed alongside a lavish Austrian soup tureen. A Syrian harpy and Thai lotus petals don’t produce an impression of incongruity. In their own way, the pots tell a story equally if not more diverse than the narrative woven across centuries by de Waal.

While the volume must have omissions, it gives the impression of completeness and complexity. This is aided by the author’s elegantly composed captions, which at once concise and lyrical. More importantly, it places the diverse practice of ceramics in the context of painting, sculpture, and all those other ‘fine arts’, making us question why it’s always pigeonholed somewhere else less easy to reach.