Anna Baddeley

I’ll never forget my first piece of secondary school Maths homework. Our hapless teacher, fresh out of training college and anxious to be liked, instructed us to decorate the front page of our exercise books with the slogan: “Maths is Fun!” Even the dimmest wits among us could see she was up to something. If Maths really were fun, then surely it could stand up for itself, without us copying out this patronising propaganda in felt-tip bubble writing. Instead, by starting off on the defensive, the well-intentioned Miss Purkiss ended up exposing her total lack of belief in her own subject. (I need hardly add that, out of a class of thirty, not one of us has gone on to become a Nobel mathematics laureate). I’m reminded of “Maths is Fun!

If product placement makes you bad tempered then yesterday’s papers won’t have done much good for your blood pressure. Whatever were Lurpak thinking, letting their spreadable butter be featured on the Number 10 breakfast table in Cameron’s Sunday Times photoshoot? How sad that this revolutionary foodstuff, probably the best invention since the internet, will now be forever tainted by spin. Even more devastating, however, was the revelation that a carefully positioned copy of Literary Review will appear on M’s desk in the new Bond film. “For your highbrows only!” proclaimed the Mail on Sunday, in the kind of headline that gives punning a bad name.

If you’re the sort of person who can’t get enough of literary biography then you’re spoilt for choice this autumn. Our bookshops – what’s left of them – are bursting with writerly lives and letters. Here’s what the critics made of the ten most-talked-about titles: Martin Amis: The Biography by Richard Bradford This sympathetic biography has got some pretty dreadful reviews, as you’ll know if you’ve read the Spectator’s Briefing Note. David Sexton’s hatchet job in the Evening Standard was the most brutal. ‘His book is unreadably poor.

Anyone who’s been charged with plagiarism knows there are two ways to save face. Either own up and claim you were making a statement, or deny and employ the ‘Great Minds’ defence, like I did when accused of copying Tacitus in my A-Level history coursework. The funny thing about Q.R. Markham, whose much-hyped spy thriller has been pulped after readers discovered it was a patchwork of other novels, is that he’s stayed silent. Naturally, this has prompted others to invent their own theories as to what the Brooklyn bookseller, real name Quentin Rowan, was up to.

The Man Booker committee has appointed Peter Stothard as the chairman of next year’s judges. What a dreary decision. I’ve nothing against Sir Peter Stothard; the TLS is a fine, upstanding publication — although whether it can be said to ‘zip along’ is a matter of taste. No, it’s more that in picking someone so literary establishment, so safe, they’ve shown the bullies did get to them after all. It’s like being teased at school for your pigtails, pretending you don’t care, then turning up the next day with a ponytail. Or a weak government U-turning on policy (to their credit, none of the Man Booker people has come out and tried to claim this year’s prize was in fact a consultation process with readers).

I have an idea that will rescue not only civilisation, but publishing too. It came to me in a second-hand bookshop in Oxford. I was idly browsing their selection of Pelicans from the forties and fifties, sniggering at the barmy ideas in Town Planning by Thomas Sharp and thinking George Bernard Shaw’s Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Socialism, Capitalism, Sovietism & Fascism would make a wonderful ironic present. Then it occurred to me: isn’t it sad we don’t have an equivalent to Pelican today. For the ignorant among you, Pelican was the non-fiction arm of Penguin’s great project to deliver cheap, intelligent books to the masses.

We bring you October’s most scathing book reviews: Phil Baker on Our Lady of Alice Bhatti by Mohammed Hanif (Sunday Times) ‘Too knockabout and buffoonish to be a serious study of violence to women in Pakistani culture, too ugly to be funny, this heavy-handed book might be well intended but it is a bloody mess.’ Virginia Blackburn on Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? by Jeanette Winterson (Sunday Express) ‘The main problem with this ridiculous book is that Jeanette clearly thinks that her opinions and feelings about everything are totally fascinating whereas to the rest of us she comes across as self-obsessed, self-indulgent and with an ego the size of a planet.

Publishing a biography just after its subject’s death is a risky business: if it’s too flattering, it will be labelled as hagiography and not taken seriously; if it’s too unflattering, it seems disrespectful and you alienate his fans. Attempting to vault over these hurdles is Walter Isaacson – the former managing editor of Time magazine and author of biographies of Einstein and Benjamin Franklin – who claims to have written the definitive life of Steve Jobs. Though he never read it, the late Apple co-founder authorised this biography and was interviewed by Isaacson over forty times. Are there any big revelations? Not really. He didn’t like Bill Gates. He refused to meet his natural father. He wasn’t very nice to work for.

Gangs, suicide bombers, paedophiles, Somali pirates: the world is swarming with people who want to hurt us. And yet Steven Pinker, a Harvard psychologist, thinks we’ve never been safer. In The Better Angels of Our Nature, he argues that violence has actually declined from prehistory to today, due to a combination of progressive thinking and neurological evolution. What are the critics saying? Most reviews have been ecstatic. The Economist called it ‘magisterial’, the New York Times thought it ‘supremely important’, while David Runciman told Guardian readers it was a ‘brilliant, mind-altering book’.

“We think we know what the British Empire did to the world. But what did it do to us?” asks Jeremy Paxman in Empire: What Ruling the World did to the British, the tie-in book to his forthcoming TV series. Paxman’s aim is to look at how the empire shaped Britain, tracing its influence in everything from to the food we eat and the sports we play, to the way we travel and the way we trade. What are the critics saying? Reviewers eager to stick their knives into a wistful paean for colonialism, or a guilt-ridden apologia, were disappointed. Paxman’s book – as you would hope from a BBC production – is admirably balanced.

With one eye on as yet empty Christmas stockings and the other on cold winter's nights, here is a short list of essential non-fiction titles recently released in paperback. 1) The Emperor of All Maladies by Siddhartha Mukherjee This “biography” of cancer by a New York oncologist whisks readers from the first documented appearance of the disease to modern day battles to find a cure. What the critics thought: Alexander Linklater, Observer: “[A] great and beautiful book … The notion of "popular science" doesn't come close to describing this achievement. It is literature” Jervoise Andreyev, Spectator: “This is a book about the past not the future.

It’s a shame The Sense of an Ending won the Booker. Not because the prize wasn’t deserved — based on that shortlist, I’m sure the judges made the right decision — but because I don’t think it shows its author in his best light. In time, probably around now, people will forget the hoo-ha over the 2011 Man Booker Prize. No one will remember that X said her five-year-old could have come up with a better shortlist, or that Y told X to stop being such an elitist snob. And I worry that readers coming to Barnes afresh, assuming The Sense of an Ending to be his best book, will be disappointed. Which would be sad because he’s a brilliant writer, the first modern grown-up novelist I really fell in love with.

Who’s Jeffrey Sachs? Leading American development economist and United Nations adviser, Sachs is broadly on the left of the political spectrum. His most famous book is The End of Poverty. What’s the book about? Another analysis of the current financial crisis, the book is a mixture of diagnosis and prescription, focusing on America. What are his big ideas? Sachs is no Keynesian, calling the idea to solve the crisis with more government borrowing “a magical argument without any empirical support”. He thinks the US urgently needs to stabilise its national debt, for reasons both economic and moral.

Be honest, how many times have you used your local library in the past year? If you live in Kensal Rise, the answer is “not enough”. Before it was locked up last week, after the High Court overturned a last-ditch appeal by campaigners, its pretty Victorian library had been getting only 850 visits a week.   With each of these visits costing £4, Brent Council decided this wasn’t sustainable. Kensal, along with five other “under-performing” libraries, would be closed, with some of the £1 million saved going towards the borough’s six remaining libraries. There are also plans underfoot to build a new “super library” near Wembley stadium.

What’s it about? The Great Crash of 2008 inspired a glut of books aiming to demystify the credit crunch for the financially illiterate. Michael Lewis’ Boomerang attempts to do the same for this new Eurozone crisis. Based on articles he wrote for Vanity Fair, the book is a whistlestop tour through Iceland, Greece, Ireland, Germany and California. Who is Michael Lewis? A former bond trader turned financial journalist, Michael Lewis specialises in explaining complex financial matters in an accessible and funny way. The American author’s last book was credit crunch primer The Big Short. Does he have any insights?

Why do I keep hearing about Dickens? This is just the start of it. 7 February 2012 is the bicentennary of Dickens’ birth, and there are all sorts of commemorative shenanigans planned for next year. Expect lots more biographies and documentaries. Who’s Claire Tomalin? An award-winning biographer of Jane Austen, Thomas Hardy, Samuel Pepys, Mary Wollstonecraft and Katherine Mansfield. Her background is journalism rather than academia. She’s married to the author Michael Frayn. What’s the deal with this biography? Tomalin’s book claims to offer a concise, rounded portrait of the man and his work.

David Sexton on The Bees by Carol Ann Duffy (Evening Standard) ‘It all feels very GCSE … there's too much verbal prancing, too little that's original being said, particularly when the poems are not personal. You end the book thinking that if this is poetry, it's a trivial art. But it is not.’ David Annand on Damned by Chuck Palahniuk (Literary Review) ‘Part Judy Blume homage, part Wiki-guide to theological anthropology, part metafictional meditation on the autonomy of imagined characters, part Breakfast Club pastiche, part juvenile fantasy romp and part Brangelina character assassination: it manages, beyond all reasonable expectations, to be worse than this makes it sound.

Two big pieces of digital publishing news this week: first, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos unveiled the Kindle Fire – the 'iPad killer'. Then yesterday, the launch of Bloomsbury Reader: a new digital imprint resurrecting hundreds of out-of-print titles by HRF Keating, Storm Jameson, VS Pritchett and other writers that used to be famous. It has never been a better time to be a reader. Why then is there still an underlying suspicion of digital publishing? You can understand the wariness from some in the book trade, which was late to digital and is now terrified of getting a raw deal.

That Used to Be Us: What Went Wrong with America? And How it Can Come Back Who’s it by? Thomas L Friedman (Pulitzer-winning New York Times columnist and author of The World is Flat) and Michael Mandelbaum (Professor of American Foreign Policy at John Hopkins University). What’s it about? How America lost its superpower status and what it can do to get it back.  Friedman and Mandelbaum distil America’s crisis into four main problem areas: Lack of focus since the end of the Cold War, and especially since 9/11.