Books

Going mad about Going Sane by Adam Phillips
Phillips avoids discussing florid insanity as such, rather like Foucault said psychiatry would always be bound to do. Unkindly, one suspects that real madness would freak Phillips, with his measured tones and carefully constructed paradoxes and reversals.
Rob Weatherill

The Brooklyn Follies by Paul Auster
'The Book Of Human Folly', the Borges-lite title of Auster's book-within-a-book is, in fact, a sly definition of the overlapping stories that The Brooklyn Follies unveils. Auster presents a cast of variously flawed and sullied characters, who develop throughout the narrative and are finally redeemed at the novel's close.
Dean Nicholas

The Possibility of an Island by Michel Houellebecq
His critique is relentlessly literal and forcefully unsubtle. Houellebecq's outrageous naughtiness, nihilistic misery and crude sexiness appeal to the inner teenager.
Michael Savage

Reading Shakespeare The Rough Guide to Shakespeare, by Andrew Dixon, How to Read Shakespeare, by Nicholas Royle, William Shakespeare, in his times, for our times, by Michael Rosen
Lionel Trilling never counterposed character and politics as Rosen does; seeing them rather as entwined. Rosen may wish to rescue the radicalism of Shakespeare, but he needn't bin 'character analysis' in doing so.
Munira Mirza

How Mumbo-jumbo Conquered the World by Francis Wheen
Wheen is not at pains to justify his faith in the Enlightenment; he presents this book as a catalogue of modern errors, not as popular philosophy.
Amol Rajan

The Sea by John Banville
There should be no great surprise in a prize for literature being awarded to a well-written book, and Banville can by no means be accused of stylistic obscurantism. The 'quality of writing' is more than a superficial gloss: the narrator seeks to produce something permanent in place of the disintegration and loss described.
Simon Cooke

Martin Lukes: who moved my BlackBerryTM? by Lucy Kellaway
Successful satire goes beyond the everyday experiences of its audience and takes the stuff of life we are all familiar with to its absurd but logical conclusions. Kellaway mainly succeeds in duplicating real life experiences of office workers, not transcending thems.
Rachel Greenstein Savage

The Strange Death of Tory England by Geoffrey Wheatcroft
Today's Tory party seems a colourless, rudderless crew, a sorry affair of opportunist modernisers (folks who live in Notting Hill but whose spiritual home is Islington), traditionalists, fearful fence-sitters and don't knows.
Nicky Charlish

Everything Bad is Good for You - How Popular Culture is Making Us Smarter by Steven Johnson
Johnson eschews questions of meaning and content, focusing instead on the 'cognitive complexity' of popular culture, as well as the wider determinates of this complexity.
Toby Marshall

The New Egalitarianism by Anthony Giddens and Patrick Diamond
What's new about the 'new egalitarianism' is that equality has become an issue largely removed from the field of political contestation, and is no longer conceived of as a zero-sum game of social redistribution.
James Gledhill

Climate Change Begins at Home by Dave Reay
In contrast to his pessimism about social and technological change, Reay shows a remarkable enthusiasm for engineering our behaviour. Reay repeatedly makes an analogy between energy use and addiction. He proposes a 'Climate Watchers' organisation modelled on Weight Watchers.
Joe Kaplinsky

The People's Act of Love by James Meek
Meek's characters all have motivations, opportunities, and rationalisations for their acts - indeed, it is precisely these rationalisations that allow the most horrific and frightening of the characters to describe his brutality against other human beings as '…the people's act of love to its future self'.
Robin Vandome

The World's Banker: A Story of Failed States, Financial Crises and the Wealth and Poverty of Nations by Sebastian Mallaby
The World Bank is anything but the malign and resolute machine of its critics, relentlessly subjecting helpless Third World farmers to its uncompromising brand of free market fundamentalism. The Bank appears caught up in its own doubts, desperate for new ideas, and in general not very sure of where it stands.
Chris Bickerton

Tales of the Decongested Foyles Bookstore, London
This is a monthly literary evening that aims to promote new and unpublished short fiction, on its website and at these wine-and-cheese-fuelled soirees.
Dean Nicholas

What Good Are the Arts? by John Carey
If artistic merit is relative only in the same sense that ethics or politics are relative, it is hard to see the point in making such an argument.
Dolan Cummings

Rip It Up And Start Again: Post-Punk 1978-1984 by Simon Reynolds
Reynolds reminds us that 'Postpunk was constructive and forward-looking, its very prefix implying faith in a future that punk had said didn't exist'. But it couldn't last.
Nicky Charlish

The Great Abdication by Alexander Deane
In reality, far from abdicating, the middle class is in the thick of things. To those who ask 'what is Blair's political programme?' the answer is the middle class has never had a political programme.
Dave Hallsworth

Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Survive by Jared Diamond
This is the work of a modified Malthus - the patron-saint of all that is green - in which population outstrips food supply where certain conditions are met. And, for all Diamond's allusions to evidence and the authority of his scientific training, he can't help but insist that these conditions are always threatening to unfold.
David Clements

Chronicles: Volume One by Bob Dylan
The standard autobiographical techniques - chronological narrative, self-searching analysis of the key events in the subject's life, critical refutation and score-settling - are here eschewed in favour of mini-essays on Dylan's favourite writers, musicians and influences.
David Bowden

The Anxious City by Richard J Williams
Despite the visual transformation of our cityscapes, punctuated as they are by these ever-more spectacular buildings and developments, there remains an underlying continuity with the typically parochial architecture of the past.
David Clements

Tony Blair and the Ideal Type by JH Grainger
Tony Blair does not have the freedom of action that JH Grainger imagines, wondering why Blair and Brown are so slow in taking charge and changing things. The truth is they were as much prisoners of circumstances as the rest of society.
Dave Hallsworth

The Revolutionary Road Richard Yates and the American Dream
Yates' charting of the descent of American consciousness away from the cliché of pioneering, blind optimism and exuberance to weary insecurity and alienation is an achievement that reaches beyond any genre.
Natasha Hulugalle

The Paradoxical Primate by Colin Talbot
Drawing on a wealth of literature from areas as diverse as management theory, economics and sociobiology, Talbot attempts to construct a pluralist view in the spirit of EO Wilson's Consilience, in which the human mind is considered neither as a blank slate nor as entirely socially determined.
Caspar JM Hewett