“There was a time not so very long ago when boys were taught to be men” writes author, archaeologist and broadcaster Neil Oliver, and “part of the education of boys came from reading tales of brave and selfless deeds”. Not so any more. “It’s rubbish being a British man at the moment…nowadays the rest of the world sees British men as the performing seals of George W Bush’s Wild West Show. We’re the sick men of Europe too with our lazy fat guts and our binge-drinking.” He also opines that nothing grand or challenging that we do now is simply for the sake of it; nothing is important unless it is done live on air or filmed to be broadcast to the masses – perhaps a strange complaint from a man who makes his living from such media. But while being an archaeologist in Scottish winters, growing hero hair and appearing on TV in armour and wielding swords may be a little bit manly, Oliver is more interested in manliness on a much grander scale and how stories about such manliness could be an antidote to his despair for the youth of today.

Neil Oliver

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When Father Ted presented her with a machine that would ‘take the misery out of tea-making’ TV’s most aesthetically challenged housekeeper Mrs. Doyle lamented ‘some people enjoy the misery’. It’s more or less the way I feel about camping; I certainly don’t camp for any pleasure I derive from it, rather a belief that it’s somehow character building and morally robust. I’m certainly not the first to think so and in The Art of Camping Matthew de Abaitua takes us on a trip back in (fairly recent) history to look at those people for whom camping was a means to rehabilitation or a way of instilling certain values, using socialist in principle.

Part history, part memoir (though happily much less so than Emma Kennedy’s ‘The Tent, the Bucket and Me’, a recent book about remembered camping trips in the 1970s that was so awful it set my teeth on edge) The Art of Camping:The History and Practice of Sleeping Under the Stars reminds us that while a camping can be a much needed tonic from the irritations of modern life, a way of getting back to nature and temporarily forgetting the rat race, the practice has also been (and continues to be) advocated by extremists and oddballs.

Matthew de Abaitua

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I started with an article by Professor P Lal, a rejoinder to Jyotirmoy Datta, on why he wrote in English, ‘We do not write in English because it is a pan-Indian language of the educated; we write because we cannot write as well in any other language’, revisiting the incisive words of the man who was the doyen of Indian Writing in English, or Indo Anglian literature. Then I went onto Khushwant Singh at his vigorous best writing about Delhi, in a collating of some of his columns. There was a piece about the notorious Sashtibrata, writing letters in English for Delhi’s shoeshine boys and turning up in rags at tatters at the Delhi offices of The Statesman.

And of course, there were the usual subjects, s review of Nirad C Chaudhuri’s Continent of Circe, an interview of Naipaul by Adrian Rowe-Evans, a review by Saleem Peeradina on Satyajit Ray’s films.

Achal Prabhala, Arshia Sattar, Laeeq Futehally

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How To Be a Woman may seem an oddly titled book for a 33 year old woman to be reading – surely with 33 years of practice I must have figured it out by now? Yet despite this ample experience, being a woman is something I feel I’m a bit rubbish at. I only own one dress (the one I got married in, never to be worn again). I only own one pair of heels that I can’t walk in (putting me apparently way below average on this count). I never wear, and never have worn, make-up (not even on my wedding day – I drew the line at having to wear a frock). I don’t have a handbag, either (why would I need one when I have a perfectly serviceable rucksack and pockets in my clothes?). And the biggest failing of all – I don’t want babies.

How To Be a Woman is described as being part rant, part memoir, and part The Female Eunuch rewritten “from a barstool”. Yes, that’s right: a lot of How To Be a Woman is about FEMINISM. Before a lot of you flee before the very mention of this word, let me say that Moran is far from being one of those scary, aggressive men-hating feminists

Caitlin Moran

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It seems to me that there are (at least) two sides to Sebastian Faulks. On one hand there’s the genius writer of fantastic books like Birdsong and The Girl at the Lion d’Or which are so convincing that he tells us that readers refuse to believe he just made them up. On the other there’s the slightly stuffy chap who appears on dull but worthy Radio 4 programmes like ‘The Write Stuff’ (surely a show designed for rather smug clever people to show off how clever they are to an audience of baffled listeners) and looks like the sort of chap who probably has leather patches on his corduroy jackets. When I was offered Faulks’ latest book I was excited because he writes such fantastic fiction – but when I realised it was non-fiction, my spirits dipped a bit. I probably should have given him more credit.

Faulks on Fiction is a companion book for the BBC 2 series of the same name which starts on Saturday 5th February.

Sebastian Faulks

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When I was presented with a copy of John Kay’s book Obliquity, my heart sank just a little at seeing the words “goals” and “achieved” used in the same sentence on the front cover. Books that use these sorts of words are usually dull, prescriptive and….well, the sort of books that Kay goes to considerable length to tell you are not in slightest bit helpful. Why? Because they are too direct to work in an uncertain world such as ours.

Obliquity – as a more effective alternative to directness in Kay’s terminology – is basically an extended essay that grew out of a short article in the Financial Times’ weekend magazine in January 2004.

John Kay

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I’m not much of a fan of the self-help genre and I believe that most self-help books do little for their readers other than inducing a greater sense of self-loathing and diminished self-worth when those readers fail to convert themselves into better people overnight. How many copies of ‘How to Win Friends and Influence People’ are sitting on the shelves of friendless and uninfluential people who can’t quite remember how they ever thought something they paid a few quid for was going to change their personality overnight? I try to avoid getting sucked in – well obviously when you’re perfect already there’s not much need – but even I am prone to the odd purchase. I have more shelf-space than I care to measure devoted to various tomes on mind mapping and ‘de-junking’ my life whilst my mind remains largely terra incognita and my life is absolutely full of junk.

Oliver Burkeman

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I’ve worked in the food industry for nearly 15 years. I think I’m quite a thoughtful and philosophical soul. So the idea of a book on Food and Philosophy appealed to me. However, perhaps I’d been expecting something a bit ‘lighter’; a bit more ‘Food for Dummies’ perhaps. I’d not really prepared myself for a highly academic treatment on the subject of food. I tried to read it in bed, I tried to read it in the bath but I never really found the time and place to get the most of this book.

In the introduction to the book the editors – Fritz Allhoff and Dave Monroe – suggest that the reader can treat the book as a menu from which choose the courses that interest them.

Dave Monroe, Fritz Allhoff

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Serial Killers: Being and Killing is part of a series published by Wiley-Blackwell that concentrates on providing a general view of philosophy for those (including this author) who are not experts in the area. Other books in the series concentrate on everyday life issues, including beer, cannabis, porn, cycling and Christmas, amongst others. Serial Killers is probably the most serious subject out of all of them, but it is nevertheless not as hard a read as some people may expect – it really will be quite comprehensible to most people, with only a few complicated terms, such as phenomenology, thrown in every now and again. The book as a whole deals with the reasons behind serial killing: why serial killers behave in the way that they do and how they are viewed by the public. The question of whether serial killers can ever be moral is raised, as is the question of whether we can learn anything from a serial killer’s behaviour.

S. Waller

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Given the choice, would you rather hang out with optimists or pessimists? It seems like a simple choice doesn’t it? Wouldn’t we all choose a life uplifted by rubbing shoulders with perpetually sunny cheery glass-half-full types over one dragged down and depressed by those who always expect to lose a fiver and find a shirt button?

Laurence Shorter’s book ‘The Optimist‘ is a one man quest to uncover the secret of optimism and is based on the premise that optimists have better lives – or maybe optimists just cope better when faced with adversity. That’s part of the problem; it’s quite hard to get a clear idea of why Shorter really wants to discover the secret of positivity. He believes that if he can become an optimist, then his life will be better and he will be more successful.

Laurence Shorter

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If you had asked me a week ago what one thing I would most want if I was about to live through the collapse of Western civilisation, my answer would almost certainly have been “Ray Mears”. As a life-long urban dweller who has only once been camping, my only means of survival should we lose all the comfy trapping of civilisation that most of us have come to depend on for food, warmth and safety is a battered old Swiss army knife dating from the days I went on archaeological digs; a pair of hiking boots (ditto); a torch, and a husband who was once a boy scout. Thinking about it now, it seems quite a trivial haul to last until rescue comes (you will be on your own for 3-5 days is case of a major disaster according this book, if help comes at all). In an emergency, people apparently respond in one of three ways, known as to 10-80-10 rule: 10% would be utterly useless and a potential liability to their fellow survivors, 80% would be too shocked to think or act rationally, and 10% would remain calm and become the leaders of the group. A sneaking suspicion that I would definitely fall into the second group if not the first suggested that it would be no bad thing to read Neil Strauss’ “Emergency”; it may not make me into a Ray Mears, but I might just pick up something useful from it.

Neil Strauss

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