William Leith 
The Society of Timid Souls, by Polly Morland - review
In this book about courage, Polly Morland talks to lots of people who should know what it is. She talks to soldiers, surfers, a matador, firefighters and professional daredevils. She… Read more
Destroying angel in the ether
A few years ago, James Lasdun wrote The Horned Man, a novel about Laurence Miller, an English lecturer in an American college who descends into paranoia. At first, he thinks… Read more
Safety in danger
In his book The Black Swan, Nassim Taleb told us that the world is a much weirder place than we can bear to believe. It is full of occult forces… Read more
An exercise in torment
In this intense, painful, excellent war novel, former Private John Bartle, a young man from rural Virginia, looks back on his tour of duty in northern Iraq in 2004. He… Read more
Torn in two by Tuggy Tug
This is a book about what we, as a society, should do with hoodies — the familiar hooded young men, black and white, who rob, stab, shoot and sell drugs.… Read more
Who needs money?
I was racking my brains, trying to understand money, trying to grasp exactly what it is, when I came across these two books. One is written by Aaron Brown, who… Read more
A gruesome sort
Everybody knows that the heart pumps blood around the body, and that a man called William Harvey somehow discovered this fact. Before Harvey, people thought that blood moved around the… Read more
The view from the top
Halfway through this book, the veil lifted, and I thought: ‘I see! I see what he’s trying to do!’ Pickering gets his characters, and moves them along, and then, after… Read more
The Devil in the mirror
As a kid growing up in Scotland in the 1950s, Dennis O’Donnell was aware of ‘loonies’, and the men in white coats who were supposed to take them away. Then,… Read more
Just One Catch by Tracy Daugherty
In the second world war, Joseph Heller was an American airman based in Corsica. He flew 60 missions over Italy and the south of France. He was the guy who… Read more
Chaos and the tidy mind
In this book, Alexander Masters, the unusual biographer, is living in Cambridge, having written Stuart: A Life Backwards, the story of a homeless man with a disordered mind. Masters lives… Read more
Speak, Memory
One day, the American journalist Joshua Foer is surfing the net, trying to find the answer to a specific question: who is the most intelligent person in the world? He… Read more
Don’t sleep on blocks of ice
I’ve only ever read one other book about sleep — the brilliant Counting Sheep, by Paul Martin, which collates and describes everything we know about sleep in a way that… Read more
Brutal and brutalising
In this book, Jonathan Safran Foer, the American novelist, tries to make us think about eating meat. He ate meat, then became a vegetarian, then ate meat again, then got… Read more
Behind the net curtains
Waking Up in Toytown, by John Burnside The Freedoms of Suburbia, by Paul Barker Finding himself in a lunatic asylum, and then at a meeting of Alcoholics Anonymous, John Burnside… Read more
Gut instincts
Julie Powell wrote Julie and Julia, a book (and now a film) in which she described her attempts to cook a huge number of recipes by the cookery writer Julia… Read more
Not so special
Alain de Botton recently said that he’d been congratulated on his prescience for writing a book about the nature of work in these times of economic woe. But he wasn’t… Read more
Beyond the wildest dreams
Collections of Nothing, by William Davies King At the start of this memoir, the author, a college professor in California, describes a scene from his divorce. He walks into the… Read more
Dark and creepy
The Folio Book of Historical Mysteries, edited by Ian Pindar This book, which is a collection of 20 essays on events and people from history, first seriously caught my attention… Read more
Through the keyhole
Here are two books by anthropologists — Sam Gosling, from the University of Texas, and Daniel Miller, from the University of London. Both are British. Both set out to explore… Read more
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