==Politics and society==
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{{newreview
|author=Adam Phillips
|summary=''The banks fell over like fat Labradors running over a wet kitchen floor.'' Surely that is the wackiest, most inappropriate simile for the credit crunch and all it has done for the world. You won't get any such namby-pamby animal likenesses from these authors, instead with quite a potty mouth on them they will lambast the modern world, the entire banking system, all those who failed to see it coming, and those millions just seemingly waiting for us all to revert to high-interest, high-risk, high-lending capitalism, so they can get back on the expenses train, and back up the rich lists.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1847443656</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Robert Winnett and Gordon Rayner
|title=No Expenses Spared
|rating=4.5
|genre=Politics and Society
|summary=It's always struck me as strange that in a period of twelve months which saw Banks collapse, stock markets tumble and house prices slide the public have reserved most of their ire for a relatively small group of people who were not exceptionally well-paid in the first place, but many of whom took the opportunity to make the most of the generous expenses which they could claim. There are only six hundred and forty six Members of Parliament – twelve months ago they were generally respected but many are now pariahs.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0593065778</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Alain de Botton
|title=A Week at the Airport: A Heathrow Diary
|rating=4
|genre=Politics and Society
|summary=A writer-in-residence at an airport is not as daft an idea as it might first seem. After all, TV programmes, and whole series, have entertained millions with what goes on in front of, and behind the scenes at such places. So this book, which is the fruit of such a residency, could be expected to produce few surprises.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1846683599</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Anita Thompson (Editor)
|title=Ancient Gonzo Wisdom: Interviews with Hunter S Thompson
|rating=4.5
|genre=Autobiography
|summary=It is almost 40 years since Dr Hunter S Thompson's seminal work ''Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas'' first graced the shelves. His gonzo style, putting himself at the centre of the story, should tell readers as much about the person doing the writing as the event he is describing. If that's the case then what is to be learned from a selection of interviews with the main man himself then? The answer is plenty.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0330510711</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Ian Jack
|title=The Country Formerly Known As Great Britain
|rating=4.5
|genre=Politics and Society
|summary=I think I've now managed to master the maxim about not judging books by their covers. I still struggle with the one about not judging them by their titles and I very nearly cam unstuck and missed 'The Country Formerly Known as Great Britain'. Being just about of an age with the author I worried that it might be a treatise about the fact that 'things weren't like this when I was a lad'. I was even more worried that I might agree with him.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0224087355</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=The Economist
|title=Pocket World in Figures 2010
|rating=5
|genre=Politics and Society
|summary=It's just about a year since I reviewed [[Pocket World In Figures 2009 by The Economist|Pocket World in Figures 2009]] and at the time – September 2008 – we were watching in horror as the world financial crisis unfolded before our eyes. Looking back now the surprise is that for most people what happened came out of the blue. The clues were plain to see and all here in this handy little book. There was the worrying state of the Iceland economy and different levels of mortgage lending in various parts of the world. Best of all it was presented as verified figures, without any accompanying narrative and it's consequently free of political spin. Bliss.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1846681367</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Scott Kilman and Roger Thurow
|title=Enough: Why the World's Poorest Starve in an Age of Plenty
|rating=4.5
|genre=Politics and Society
|summary=If you have ever wondered why famine is still widespread, so many years after Oxfam started nudging middle-class Britain into consciousness, then read ''Enough''. As a young woman, I donated to Oxfam at the end of the 1960s in the belief that concerted international action through governments plus charities would eliminate hunger within a decade or so. Four decades later, it's impossible to comprehend why children are still dying at much the same rate: one every five seconds.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1586485113</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Arundhati Roy
|title=Listening to Grasshoppers
|rating=5
|genre=Politics and Society
|summary=Stories can provoke many different reactions in the reader: pleasure, pain, delight, horror. The whole range of emotion is available to the fiction writer to ply and probe. Reactions to non-fiction works can be equally wide-ranging and can sometimes take the reader by surprise.
Like most people I came to Roy via the Booker-prize-winning novel, ''The God of Small Things'', which it transpires, is her only novel to date. In the intervening twelve years Roy has concentrated her undoubted literary abilities in the political arena, engaging with the less attractive side of her native India.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0241144620</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Rupert Wright
|title=Take Me to the Source: In Search of Water
|rating=3.5
|genre=Politics and Society
|summary=Whatever you expect from a book about water, ''Take Me to the Source'' probably won't provide it. Neither a whimsical aquatic travelogue, nor a polemic about the economics of water, it still manages to produce unexpected insights into the element which is so vital, yet so often taken for granted.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0099512289</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Maria Tatar
|title=Enchanted Hunters: The Power of Stories in Childhood
|rating=3
|genre=Home and Family
|summary=Like most avid readers, I don't remember the time before there were books. We were brought up with books. There are family tales of my father as a child eating his breakfast with one hand, while trying to tie his shoelaces with the other and still contriving to read at the same time. They were a poor family, and books weren't just expensive, they were valuable. They were dear, in every sense of the word. Likewise my mother remembers her early school-years when every day ended with a chapter from one of the classics.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0393066010</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Lucy Wadham
|title=The Secret Life of France
|rating=4
|genre=Travel
|summary=I'm rather at a loss to describe this book for you, and I'm still uncertain how to categorise it. It's part personal memoir and part analytical. Whether you regard this particular mix as brilliant or irritating is down, I suppose, to personal taste and intellectual curiosity.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0571236111</amazonuk>
}}