Books make ideal low-impact presents, they’re easy to wrap, they pretty much always describe their contents so you can be roughly sure that you’ve got something acceptable, and they are so portable that unthankful recipients can pop them down to the British Heart Foundation shop and say “yes, it was so good I’ve been lending it to people” to explain its absence from their bookshelves. Publishers know this and will knock out any old tat around Christmas, books aimed at becoming presents for people you know or care very little about. Why else would Jeremy Clarkson be a published author, why else would tedious collections of Shakespeare’s unfunniest jokes clog the tills at WH Smiths (when all you really want is to pay for your fountain pen cartridges and get out of there, and no I don’t want a slab of Dairy Milk the size of Belgium for 5p thanks)? But every so often there’s a book which, despite having the a title starting “The Little Book of…”, you can safely read without bemoaning the crass commercialisation of the spectacle. Such a book is my, as yet unpublished, Little Book of Cliff Richards’s Girlfriends, but another one is Norman...
