This book could also be titled Six Irritating Things Before Breakfast, as it seems to have arisen out of the author’s irritation at fellow human beings.

Reading the dust jacket of this book, I had high hopes. I looked forward to a well-known scientist and science communicator writing sympathetically and knowledgably about God and religious belief. It would be a breath of fresh air from the kind of science communicators who are full of antipathy to God and religious belief and can only ridicule or gaze uncomprehendingly at a world as religious as it ever was, thinking themselves (mistakenly) somehow devoid of faith.

Natan Sharansky wants to see tyranny go the way of slavery, and he believes he has an approach that will achieve just that. But does his analysis of the road to a democratic and peaceful world wrestle with all the dimensions of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict that he is so involved in himself?

Affluenza explores the social cost of the quest for wellbeing through the thrill of consumption. It identifies debt, overwork, waste and the use of drugs to medicate our misery as the true personal, social and environmental cost of the consumer lifestyle. Society is ‘in the grip of a collective psychological disorder’ and something has to be done.

Kurt Vonnegut said that there is only one story – man falls in hole, man gets out of hole. At the beginning of Umberto Eco’s new novel a man awakes in a fog, in hospital, not knowing his name, or even his own face, let alone his wife or children. This is a fascination hole to watch a man climb out of, and a daring scenario for a novelist to portray convincingly. Does Eco manage to pull it off?