It is, of course, impossible to avoid risk completely. You could stay indoors and reduce your risk of death from lightning, transport accidents or being attacked by strangers. But that would only increase your long-term risk of chronic health problems and early death, thanks to physical inactivity and social isolation.

So let me rephrase that: why do we take the risks we do?

I suppose we could make our life decisions based on mathematics. And before doing anything we could calculate the odds of success. Or, assess by how much a favourite vice would increase the chances of getting a horrible disease.

But we don’t do the maths. Not because we’re stupid – but because we’re human, and we live in a messy human world, most of which can’t be reduced to numbers.

A great illustration of this is The Norm Chronicles, by Michael Blastland and David Spiegelhalter. It’s the story of Norm (or Average Man) but also of Prudence (who tries to avoid all risks) and an expanding family of characters called Kevin or Kelvin, who take every risk going. Spiegelhalter is a statistician, so the book does a fine job of using numbers to get some perspective on risk and danger. But The Norm Chronicles is much more than a maths book.

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It is also a highly entertaining read, as the characters’ varying attitudes to risk get them into comical or hair-raising scenarios. Whether through embracing risk, or excessive desperation to avoid it, Kelvin, Prudence and Norm allow us to laugh at exaggerated versions of ourselves, and then reflect on how we make decisions in the real world.

“Although we recognise the patterns in numbers as much as anyone,” the authors write, (modestly), “we can’t bring ourselves to say that any of our characters are irrational in choosing to ignore them and going their own way.”

After all, rational calculation, based on data from the past and present, only gets us so far with making decisions that commit us to one or other branch of our infinite possible futures. At some point you have to go with your feelings – and make a choice about which future self you want to become, while accepting that you don’t know, and can’t fully control, the consequences of your decision.

Which brings us neatly to Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition – my second recommendation. Her subject is the inherent unpredictability of human action.

“This is not simply a question of inability to foretell all the logical consequences of a particular act, in which case an electronic computer would be able to foretell the future,” she writes, “but arises directly out of the story which, as the result of action, begins and establishes itself as soon as the fleeting moment of the deed is past.”

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For Arendt, action begins a story in the human world, and so gains meaning when looked back at from the future. It’s not only the material consequences that can’t be certain before the event, but what the story, and hence the meaning, will ultimately be. And that’s inherently unpredictable because it’s a story involving other human beings, each of whom is also free to act.

Risk today is most often used in a negative sense; it is deemed to be something we should control, minimise or avoid altogether. Being ‘At-Risk’ is now an adjective, a condition that may infect you if you’re unlucky enough to live in the wrong postcode, have the wrong family, or fall into the wrong socio-economic bracket. Most of us are encouraged to see ourselves as At-Risk to some degree – of crime, or diabetes, or mental illness.

Deliberately putting oneself at risk, or taking risks, is seen as irresponsible, or immoral. Even in a financial context, where risk is acknowledged as an inevitable part of investment, regulation is designed to quarantine and contain it.

As Arendt reminds us, however, risk is intrinsic to action. Statistics can help us assess our options, but we can never know all the consequences before we decide what to do.

Many of the things that make us safer today than our ancestors started out as highly risky projects. Commercial flight is one of the safest ways to travel, mile for mile, but we owe it to the pioneers who threw themselves into thin air, in mechanisms whose performance was an unknown quantity. Nuclear power is seen as uniquely dangerous; but the move from coal has saved over a million lives, which would mainly have been lost to mining accidents or air pollution.

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Beyond these pragmatic reasons, though, we need to value risk-taking as fundamentally human. Look, by way of illustration, at what I’ve spent the past month doing. Why did I choose to bring a new show to the Edinburgh Festival Fringe? I’m no longer making my living as a professional comedian, so I’m not trying to be ‘discovered’ or to land a comedy agent. I could have spent August in the garden, reading and working on my next book, instead of accosting strangers with leaflets, and then offering myself for their judgement daily on a tiny stage in a dark basement.

I’m here because I feared that my life was getting too safe. I felt that I had fallen into the habit of only doing things that I know I can do, and foresaw my envelope of comfort shrinking to become a straitjacket. And I wanted to find out what I was capable of, onstage with a live audience and limited control over what will happen in each show.

Only through this willingness to start something new in ignorance of how the tale will end, can we discover, and reveal to others, who we are. Not what we are – an inventory of our qualities or social categories – but who– our character that emerges only in action. “Although nobody knows whom he reveals when he discloses himself in deed or word, he must be willing to risk the disclosure,” says Arendt.

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Which brings us to Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, and Wind, Sand and Stars. My final recommendation for your summer reading is a collection of non-fiction writing about Saint-Exupéry’s life as a pilot in the early, and terribly risky, years of aviation. He writes with a deep humanism about the freedom of flight, but also about the connection he felt with other people. Some of them crossed his path only once in a distant land, or were nothing more to him than the sparks of their firelight, glimpsed far below his wings at night. But to him, each person was an irreplaceable subject, the centre of a unique universe that would vanish at the moment of their death.

Saint-Exupéry chose a life which made the risk of death tangible every day, in the companions who took off but did not land, and were not seen again. He himself describes crash landing in the desert, defying the odds by not dying on impact, only to realise that the most likely outcome was dying of thirst before rescuers could find him. “I have no regrets, I’ve gambled and I’ve lost,” he says at the point of resignation to death. “It was all in a day’s work. But at least I have breathed the wind of the sea.”

That story ends with rescue, of course, or we wouldn’t be reading it. Years later, though, Saint-Exupéry did take flight over the Mediterranean but never landed. His story found its ending, leaving us to draw meaning from his choice to live life to the full by embracing the risk of death.

It’s a reminder that the meaning of our lives is unlikely to be found in a vain attempt to eliminate uncertainty and risk.

Over the past few years, the cultural scene has been absorbed by big questions about race; sex, gender and sexuality; migration and refuge; identity; the people versus the elites. Literary fiction sales have gone down, but readers are increasingly engaging with non-fiction. In a world where so many charged issues are front and centre, it’s hard to look away.

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Gender inequality preoccupies me most. And books on the pornification of culture, rape culture, male violence, sexual exploitation, harassment and similar subjects have been piling up since well before the #MeToo movement. But I’m not sure many of them are written to change people’s minds. Indeed, they’re often bought by people who already agree with the books’ premise, and hope to shore up their own opinion.

But not my summer reads. These are persuasive: they call upon the reader’s empathy and ability to step into another’s shoes. Each of the books walks you through women’s experiences.

Inequality, prejudice and marginalisation both cause and are produced by these experiences – and the allusive approach of these books is all the more devastating because it shows the subtle totality of patriarchy. Misogyny isn’t just about sensationally shocking events but about the invisible and choking atmospheric surroundings: expectations, assumptions, stereotypes and judgements.

The books I’ve chosen may ultimately provoke political anger – but first of all they will connect with readers’ observations, memories and experiences.

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Invisible Women, by Caroline Criado-Perez, reveals in precise detail how women have been ‘designed out’ of the world we live in: excluded from medical trials, tests of industrial goods, safety checks, urban planning and city design, infrastructure and countless other aspects of daily life.

As a result, we live in a world that is literally designed for men. Full of devastating examples, Criado-Perez’s reveals the sometimes fatal consequences of such an approach.

On more searingly personal territory, the brave and harrowing book, The Apology by Eve Ensler, author of The Vagina Monologues, is a radical reckoning with her abusive father. In reality, Ensler’s father was a terrifying figure and a perpetrator of sexual violation, family violence and decades of malice.

Ensler and her family never received justice or emotional resolution – so here, she has written her own conclusion. She tries to get under the skin and inside the thoughts of her father, to achieve the closure she longed for as a child. This is an uncomfortable, counterintuitive read – but a necessary confrontation.

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No Visible Bruises by Rachel Louise Snyder, another American writer, looks behind the headlines about women killed by a partner or former partner, and explores the patterns of control, abuse, domination and gaslighting that perpetrators use to target and set up victims.

Her world is a gritty one, in which she speaks to everyone from survivors to profilers to detectives, to find out what will enable early detection and prevention of these crimes.

Ultimately, her stance is hopeful: not all men are perpetrators, male violence is not inevitable, and there are tactics and approaches that work to change things for the better.

Even when women are not in a fatally abusive situation, they – we – experience the corrosive effects of subtle mistreatment throughout our lives. Lisa Taddeo’s book about women’s emotional and personal lives, Three Women, is a quietly disturbing probe into gender dynamics which are at once utterly warped and totally normalised. Through the interviews, we encounter intelligent women whose natural desires are thwarted or exploited by the men in their lives, in painfully recognisable ways.

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Don’t Touch My Hair by the broadcaster, academic and journalist Emma Dabiri, combines the depth of cultural history with a lively examination of modern day attitudes to black women’s self-presentation, expression and presence. It also reflects on the subtleties of prejudice, from Western beauty standards to the representation of black women in the media.

Finally, Becoming by Michelle Obama. It’s an account of her journey from ambitious, well-loved daughter to First Lady. It touches upon race, class and gender, covering the vilification (as well as the plaudits) she received in public life. But it’s also a story of family and of the many different kinds of love she has given and received. It works as a tribute to resilience under political fire, but also as a simple walk through a woman’s life.

This is what unites all the books I’ve chosen for my summer reading list: they work through empathy and illustration, with maddening and moving results.

At the absolute heart of our current political and cultural turmoil is the issue of authority. Epistemic authority, if you want to be fancy about it: the difficulty of knowing what’s true, and who we can trust to tell us the truth. This ties together the widespread mistrust of “elites” and the “mainstream media”, the fear about the way in which data can be used to manipulate us, the notorious rejection of “experts” and the universal scourge of “fake news”.

So if you were looking for a book that touches on this issue, but does so in an original enough way to mark it out from its hordes of competitors – and an enjoyable enough way to be read on a sun-lounger – you could do a lot worse than Michael Blastland’s thought-provoking The Hidden Half: How The World Conceals Its Secrets.

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There are scores of books – from Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking Fast and Slow to Hans Rosling’s Factfulness – that investigate the cognitive biases and blind spots in the human brain, which form the basis for behavioural economics and the dark psychological arts of political campaigning. We’ve all now read a lot about the recency effect, availability biases, confirmation bias, anchoring and all the rest of it; we’re quite happy to trust the idea that our own minds are untrustworthy.

Blastland’s approach differs a little bit. Instead of concentrating on how our brains lead us astray, he looks instead at how much more mysterious and unknowable the outside world actually is – even were we able to look at it straight.

And, most winningly of all, he does so with special reference to a species of parthenogenetic crayfish.

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Here’s a thing. In 1995 in an aquarium in Germany, this crayfish called the marmokrebs appeared out of nowhere. It hadn’t teleported in: it had come into being through (we assume) a random mutation. And the first thing scientists noticed about this new species was that there weren’t any males. Every marmokrebs was genetically identical: a clone of a single ancestor, the marmokrebs Eve.

This offered scientists a fantastic opportunity to disentangle nature and nurture. If members of the species are all genetically identical, any differences must – as anybody would happily concede – down to environmental influences, right? So experiments were made in which marmokrebs were raised in utterly identical controlled environments – same water pH, same food, same light, same temperature, the whole works.

And here’s the marmalade-dropper: these genetically identical, identically raised crayfish were wildly, wildly different from each other. They varied in size by as much as twenty times; they had different numbers of mouthparts and wholly different markings; they reproduced at different times; they exhibited entirely individual behaviours and preferences; they showed preferences for different foods.

In practically every respect, they were as different as could be.

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So what caused these differences if not genetics or environment? Answer: we don’t know. And most laypeople – myself included, before I’d read Blastland’s book – didn’t even know we didn’t know. You, like me, probably thought that the argument in science was between genes and environment; not between genes and environment and… this other thing. Yet this other thing – this hidden half, called “enigmatic variation” – doesn’t just apply to crayfish. As much as half of human variation can’t be accounted for, writes Blastland, by either genetic or environmental factors.

The story is a caution against the idea that such knowledge as we have is a stable or reliable thing. And from there, Blastland roams across vast areas of inquiry, showing us how little we actually know.

You all know by now, for instance, that economic forecasting isn’t hugely reliable; perhaps it seems obvious that that’s in the nature of the thing. Animal spirits, irrational exuberance and all that, right?

But economic reporting, it turns out, is just as dodgy. Not only do we not know what’s going to happen, we don’t know what did happen. ONS figures for the economy two or three years ago continue to be revised in light of what has followed – and are often subject to confidence margins that can make the difference between a boom and a recession (Blastland cites one where a fall in unemployment of 3,000 was sombrely reported with a confidence margin of +/-77,000 – i.e. the figure could be a rise of 74,000 rather than a fall of 3,000).

And then there’s the “replication crisis” in the social sciences, where results on which whole subsequent fields of research have been built turn out to be, literally, junk science. Again, as many as half of the accepted results in the whole of social science or medicine are feared to be unreliable or plain wrong. The experiments simply don’t replicate. Even medicines that we know work may only work for a tiny percentage of patients – and we can’t predict which ones and we don’t know why.

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Blastland’s book is invigorating, though, because it’s not making the case for disregarding all our knowledge about the world, rejecting any sort of expertise or academic data and going with our tribal instincts. Rather, he argues that we need to be humbler in our approach to what we do and don’t know and the methods we use to arrive at our conclusions.

Politicians, scientists and reporters should put aside the blustering pretence of absolute confidence and – by sharing their doubt and caution – become more trustworthy. The first step to understanding the world better is acknowledging the limits of our current understanding. To be able to say: it’s more complicated than it looks. The wise man, as it’s sometimes said, knows how little he knows.

Rather than unleashing an era of liberal democratic orthodoxy, as many predicted, the end of the Cold War produced a world where grand narratives ceased to exist. The disappearance of these narratives has led to an erosion in the value of truth and objectivity.

This is one of the arguments put forward in This is Not Propaganda: Adventures in the War Against Reality, a new book by the journalist and author Peter Pomerantsev. As Pomerantsev writes:

“If the need for facts is predicated on a vision of a concrete future that you are trying to achieve, then when that future disappears, what is the point of facts?”

Many articles have been written about how the internet has encouraged us to create our own ‘filter bubbles’. However Pomerantsev’s book delves much deeper than similar accounts. It is not merely ‘information abundance’ that is screwing with our politics. The root of the current crisis also rests in our loss of faith in the future and, with it, the Enlightenment notion of objective truth.

One hundred and thirty-seven years ago Nietzsche declared God to be dead. Yet while the Enlightenment ‘killed’ the possibility of belief in a deity, religious faith persisted under avowedly secular guises. During the 20th century communism partially filled the void left by the retreat of religion. The materialist conception of history held out an answer to every question just as the Gospels once had.

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In time the communist God failed, and the future was viewed as one of liberal progress, an ‘end of history’ as Francis Fukuyama termed it. Yet the global financial crash – and arguably the Iraq war with it – destroyed faith in this narrative too.

If the 20th century was the age of ideology, it has been replaced by an era of subjectivity and competing truths. A few on the extreme fringes still cling to grand narratives – the Islamic State for example – but most big ideas have slipped away. Today we each shape our own narrative. We choose what is true based on our own solipsistic inclinations. The result is a hyper-individualised political climate where concepts such as objectivity and impartiality have passed out of fashion.

The proliferation of information produced by the internet has made it easier to blur the distinction between truth and falsehood. Conspiracy theories increasingly fill the void where ideology – and certainty about the future – used to be. When there are so many competing truths that few individuals have the time to adequately parse, we are inclined to accept the narrative (however far-fetched) that chimes with our emotional predispositions.

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The triumph of contemporary identity politics has helped to turbocharge this notion that feelings are more important than facts. The ethos of the Sixties trumpeted “feelings as an antidote to corporate and bureaucratic rationality”, as Pomerantsev puts it. Objectivity is merely subjectivity in disguise, according to the purveyors of this identitarian creed.

Of course, this great transformation in our politics would not be possible without the highly specific model of laissez-faire capitalism that triumphed 40 years ago. It is within this framework that identity has become a marketable commodity. We each choose our own ‘truth’ – our sacred cause to rally behind – just as we choose from ten different brands of soda in the supermarket.

This “future-less present” arrived first in Russia in the 1990s. During this chaotic decade, people behaved according to rules they made up for themselves. “The image of a common mankind is impossible, and no alternative has emerged,” writes Gleb Pavlovsky, one of Vladimir Putin’s early spin-doctors. “Everyone invents their own ‘normal’ humanity, their own ‘right’ history.”

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It isn’t hard to see how this personalised, identity-specific (and highly subjective) notion of reality has ignited increasing political polarisation across the developed world. Individuals are no longer the vehicles through which political ideas are transmitted. Instead, ideas are interwoven with identity. To disagree is increasingly a personal affront – a ‘microaggression’ – rather than a mere argument over competing visions of the future.

Social media amplifies this trend by encouraging individuals to stake out extreme positions in order to stay relevant and boost their personal brand. As Pomerantsev writes, “Social media is a sort of major-narcissism engine that can never quite be satisfied, leading us to take up more radical positions to get more attention”.

A highly subjective version of reality has been adopted by states too. In the contemporary era states make up their own rules and “murder people and indeed whole peoples according to their own ‘sovereign’ logic,” Pomerantsev writes, drawing on the work of the Russian historian of the Holocaust Mikhail Gefter. We can see this logic play out everywhere from Syria to China to Myanmar.

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The success of political leaders such as Trump, Erdoğan and Orbán rests on the “anarchic liberation” from constraint they provide to their followers. That crude rejection of civility is comparable to the “suicidal escape from reality” Hannah Arendt wrote about in The Origins of Totalitarianism.

Yet unlike the tyrannical regimes of the 20th century, authoritarian governments no longer strive for omnipotence. Instead they pretend there is no objective reality, only competing visions.

In depicting one man’s struggle against a totalitarian state, George Orwell wrote that freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. Unlike Orwell’s protagonist Winston Smith, the danger we face is not centralisation. We are slipping into a world not of a single truth set down by an infallible one-party state, but of an infinite number of truths that are impossible for the ordinary citizen to navigate.

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To counter this, we must become better as individuals at distinguishing between information that is accurate and information that merely confirms our biases.

But ‘the West’ – for want of a better term – must also rediscover a sense of purpose if it is to combat the threat of disinformation. Liberal democracies are more amenable places to live than societies that have come before and are likely to come after. We live longer, are freer, and however mediocre the current political crop of political leaders are, we do at least have a realistic chance of removing them.

This is not mere propaganda, to paraphrase the title of Pomerantsev’s brilliant and unsettling book. The threat to democracy may have changed since Orwell’s time but it is nevertheless real. Freedom is still the freedom to point out that objective reality exists – regardless of how you or I or Vladimir Putin may feel about it.

Mental health is having a moment. The mythical British stiff upper lip is long gone, and we are all encouraged, from even as lofty a place as Kensington Palace, to let our vulnerabilities show. And, uncomfortable as it is, this can only be a good thing.

The label ‘mental health’, however, is clinical and abstract. It can feel deserving of an employment policy or hashtag campaign. But it is also offputtingly worthy. Like most, I wouldn’t normally choose to immerse myself in anything with ‘mental health’ as a theme during my holidays.

Two books out this summer have helped change my mind. Far from being misery memoirs or po-faced, finger-pointing tomes about injustice, they are powerful and unexpectedly enjoyable adventures into the lives of others.

I Never Said I Loved You, by Rhik Samadder, is the memoir of a failed actor, born in Lewisham to Indian parents. It traces his journey from skinny, self-harming brown boy in the age of the National Front, to landing a job writing for the Guardian via a comedic round robin email from his temp account, which ended up in Private Eye.

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Already receiving plaudits for the beauty of the prose, Rhik’s memoir deals with childhood sexual abuse with a deceptively, and sometimes breathtakingly, light touch (Rhik is best known for his tongue-in-cheek kitchen gadget reviews). He speaks of the way abuse seems to make you susceptible to further abuse, somehow more visible to those who would harm you: “For the rest of my youth I bore violation like a beacon, like a broken window… like a crap Spider-Man whose secret power was being repeatedly molested.”

The section on the long-lasting effects of childhood racism was painful to read – Rhik attempted to sandpaper his skin, searching for “Just a scrap of Cauc beneath the Asian”. I have trouble with the phrase ‘check your privilege’, but Rhik’s straightforward, un-self-pitying narrative did more for my understanding of how being white has shaped my life and outlook than any angry demands that I do so.

Disconcertingly, woven among the traumatic events are some of the funniest passages I have ever read in non-fiction. The description of the Drama Centre acting school (“Drama Centre had earned the nickname Trauma Centre, the first casualty of trauma being rhyme”), which turned out Russell Brand and Gemma Chan, makes it sound like a sadistic madrassa for broken weirdos. His decision to give up acting came after an audition for an unpaid touring show in the Highlands involving a singing vagina puppet. His depression sometimes reads like a supporting character in a farce.

Jailbirds is seemingly a very different book. It brings us the voices of women in prison, via their chaplaincy assistant and art teacher Mim Skinner. Like anything to do with criminal justice, the themes are myriad – housing, welfare, education, gender – but underpinning all of them is mental health. We learn that 46% of women in prison have attempted suicide over their lifetimes (it’s 21% for men in prison); 53% report having experienced sexual, physical or emotional abuse in childhood, and that’s just those willing to talk about it.

Skinner’s book offers insight into the lives behind these statistics. I won’t forget the story of Paige. Plagued by serious mental health problems and addiction, her pregnancy is the longest she gets to spend with her baby. After he is taken by social services for “involuntary adoption” Mim encounters a “death in custody” notice on her way to work. Paige has killed herself.

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As with I Never Said I Loved You, these heavy, sometimes heartbreaking stories are interspersed with humour and absurdity. A running theme is the plethora of  obscure rules and regulations, which present challenges for the ingenuity of both inmates and staff. In one memorable section Mim, aghast at food waste, smuggles contraband vegetables from the prison garden in a leek-scented backpack, terrified of causing a lock-down. She veers from desperately trying to secure accommodation for offenders on release (38% do not have accommodation arranged, ending up inevitably back with abusive partners, pimps or on the streets) to vetting young offenders’ self-penned raps: “Does ‘tits’ and ‘fine ass’ count as inappropriate attitudes”?

Both writers wrestle with their own privilege, their ‘right’ to experience depression and anxiety. After witnessing inmates’ own mental health crises for too long, Mim herself ends up in counselling, despite thinking: “Mim, stop being a drama queen, you’ve got a lovely fucking life, and should be grateful so stop whining.” Rhik admits: “For decades, I didn’t feel worthy of saying I had depression. The grandiosity of depression struck me as showing off… I had confused suffering with a packet of Rolos, worried that I might take the last one.”

The two books both offer lessons in the way trauma works, helping explain the common passivity of those who’ve suffered, especially in childhood. Rhik writes:

“After trauma, our brains change, interacting with our nervous system in new patterns. Depressive responses are all but inevitable… Following a situation of extreme helplessness, we can lose our fight or flight instinct: adjusting to the reality that episodes of violation are inevitable, we give up trying to avoid them. Often, we seek them out instead. Repeating dangerous experiences of the past, in an unconscious attempt to fix them.”

For the repeat female prisoners (48% of women in prison committed an offence in order to support the drug use of someone else), that pattern looks familiar. If you’ve ever been slightly frustrated by people who seem, at least from the outside, to be stuck in the victim mentality, it’s humbling to read how difficult it is to escape from.

For those of us who have enjoyed broadly robust mental health, it’s not always clear what we are to do in this moment when the reality of mental health struggles are increasingly visible. I have sometimes felt overwhelmed by the pain presented, and in my worst moments ungraciously repelled by uncontrolled outpourings published elsewhere. What these two self-aware, wry and beautiful pieces of writing do is take the data and discomfort and make the reader connect – actually empathise – while also occasionally snorting with laughter.

One of the truths that the sometimes messy ‘mental health moment’ teaches is that we are all more tender, more fragile than we appear – than, often, we care to admit. Whether an unlikely member of the “metropolitan intelligentsia” with a column in a broadsheet, or a ‘criminal’ going back to prison because you sold yourself to buy drugs for your abuser, every person has more to them than what first meets the eye. And their stories, honestly and skilfully told, have power.

One of the frustrating aspects about my job as an academic is that I have little time to read. It’s a funny thing to say, but between teaching, administration and writing research articles for obscure journals, there are not many hours left in the day to actually sit down with a book.

This is especially problematic in my area of research, which includes populism, Brexit, Europe and anything that can be lumped under the header ‘political volatility’. There is simply too much to read. Trump, the 2016 referendum, the rise of national populism in Europe and the looming 2020 election in the US not only triggered a tsunami of public interest but also a rapidly growing pile of books.

This is one reason why non-fiction sales have been surging in recent years, easily eclipsing fiction: non-fiction audiobook sales are also growing. It is also why we have seen a parallel explosion in research monographs and articles on the same topics. Plug ‘populism’ into Google Scholar and since 2016 alone there are more than 37,000 entries. Stick ‘Trump’ in and there are already more than 100,000. All of this is why I find myself trying to relax on holiday while reading books that are way too serious, dark and close to ‘work’.

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Before getting to my picks, I wanted to say that I have both enjoyed and learned a lot from several books that tell us much about the current era of volatility. Many were well ahead of the curve.

Justin Gest’s The New Minority (2016), through meticulous research and interviews with hundreds of voters, tells us much about the appeal of populism among the white working-class in both the UK and the US. In some ways, it is a reboot of Christopher Husbands’ Racial Exclusionism and the City (1983), a classic on why people were drawn to the earlier National Front, especially in the East End of London.

Eric Kaufmann’s Whiteshift (2018), which explores how demographic change is reshaping the world around us, is one of the most important books to be published in recent years. I have also revisited Karen Stenner’s The Authoritarian Dynamic (2005) – which predicted the populist surge and shows why it is unlikely to disappear any time soon – and looked ahead with Ivan Krastev’s After Europe (2017), a realistic take on the many challenges that are facing the European Union.

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When thinking about how we react to populism, and how our political cultures are changing, I have also enjoyed Mark Lilla’s short book on identity politics, Once and Future Liberal (2018), in which he argues that many on the Left are losing their way and focusing far more on what separates people when they should be talking about what brings them together. This should be read, in my view, alongside Francis Fukuyama’s Identity (2018), which makes similar points.

I also learned a lot from Bradley Campbell’s and Jason Manning’s The Rise of Victimhood Culture (2018), alongside Jon Haidt’s and Greg Lukianoff’s The Coddling of the American Mind (2018), both of which point to worrying developments in our wider culture that look set to increase rather than curb populism and polarisation.

And I’d recommend a few books from across the spectrum that explore how deeper shifts laid a foundation long ago for our current era of political turbulence, including Robert Putnam’s Our Kids (2015), which explores educational divides; Paul Morland’s The Human Tide (2019), which like Eric Kaufmann’s book looks at demography; Charles Murray’s Coming Apart (2012), which shows how America society was fragmenting long before Trump; and Cultural Backlash (2019) by Norris and Inglehart, a book that explores how conflicts over values lie behind the populist turn.

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But this year I enjoyed three books in particular, not necessarily because I agreed with them, but because I found them stimulating.

If you buy the argument that a key faultline today and in the future is geographic – between big cities and the periphery – then you should read the polemical Twilight of the Elites (2019) by the French geographer Christophe Guilluy. In this book the author, who has already made a name for himself by writing about ‘periphery France’, or ‘forgotten France’, takes aim at the big cities (the ‘new citadels’) but also the bourgeois bohemians (‘BoBos’) who appear more interested in sharing hashtags and preaching about the wonders of diversity than delivering serious economic reform and controlling the winds of globalisation.

Twilight of the Elites extends some of Guilluy’s earlier arguments to discuss how supposedly ‘open’ cities are actually not that open at all, how the economic system is rigged against those who have been pushed out of the new citadels and how immigration is now part of the mix. Guilluy, I suspect, would not have been the least bit surprised by the eruption of the yellow vest protests in France.

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Understanding the 'gilets jaunes'

By John Lichfield

Another book that explores where liberals went wrong is Patrick Deenan’s Why Liberalism Failed (2018), which made it onto Barack Obama’s summer reading list last year. It’s not an easy book to read but, like Guilluy’s, it does ask good questions. Deenan’s central thesis is that liberalism has ‘failed’ because it has been so successful:

A political philosophy that was launched to foster greater equity, defend a pluralist tapestry of different cultures and beliefs, protect human dignity, and, of course, expand liberty, in practice generates titanic inequality, enforces uniformity and homogeneity, fosters material and spiritual degradation and undermines freedom.

Liberals, he argues, have failed to reflect seriously on how the many contradictions within their creed have alienated citizens and cleared the path for the likes of Trump (though he wrote much of the book before the 2016 election).

Why Liberalism Failed is better on diagnosing where liberalism went wrong than pointing to where we should head next. It talks about the need to sustain things that are often lost through liberalism’s individualistic society – like social bonds and culture – through “forms of self-governance that arise from shared civic participation”. It’s all pretty vague. The call is for a return to the politics of virtue and for the creation of “civic polis life”. But it’s still worth a read for the diagnosis if not the proposed course of action.

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Liberalism: the other God that failed

By John Gray

My final pick is much stronger when it comes to thinking through how we might actually respond to some of these social challenges, one of which is our rapidly ageing societies. If you buy the argument that one reason why we are witnessing all of this political turbulence is because of unprecedented rates of demographic change, then I would recommend one book that asks us not to think about why we are here but rather where we are going in the future.

As Camilla Cavendish points out in Extra Time: 10 Lessons for an Ageing World (2019), by next year, and for the first time in history, there will be more people on the planet over 65 than under 5. More grandparents than children. Our ageing societies not only reflect the fact that we are all living longer but also that many of us are having fewer children. There are now 83 countries where fertility rates are below the ‘replacement rate’, while sub-Saharan Africa will see its population quadruple to 4 billion people by 2100, with Nigeria most likely overtaking America as the world’s third most populous country.

We really have not even begun to think seriously about how these shifts will impact on our societies and politics. As Cavendish writes:

Shrinking populations will soon alter the balance of power between countries, and change the politics of immigration. Longevity is bringing back multi-generational households and creating age-diverse workforces. A dramatically changing ratio of older to younger people will force governments to rewrite the social contract … We are not ready.

Though she does not explore it directly, it seems likely to me that one of the more immediate beneficiaries of these changes will be populist politics. One of the peculiarities of our modern age is that many of the nation states that are most strongly opposed to immigration – including some of those in Eastern Europe or Japan – also happen to be the very same ageing states that are going to need it the most. Without large-scale demographic change it is hard to see how these societies will raise the tax revenue and human resource that will be required to care for rapidly ageing populations. Technology will help but perhaps not as much as people think.

Either way, the good news is that Cavendish is full of ideas about how to meet this challenge – from giving free accommodation to university students in exchange for their help with elderly co-residents, to how each of us, as we get older, can find what the Japanese call ‘ikigai’ (a reason for being that gets us to jump out of bed each morning). We can only hope that somebody out there is listening to her suggestions.

Let me just come out and say it. Decadent proclivities brought me to The House of Ulloa. My initiation took place in New Cross, South London, at an academic conference where the souvenir tote bags depicted the Goat of Mendes cavorting with a tortoise. In rooms at the Stuart Hall building of Goldsmiths College, guests of the Decadence Research Unit gave papers on the literature of auras, telepathy, astral projection and Satanism.

A South Korean Shakespeare professor talked about tantric philosophy and W. B. Yeats’s vasectomy. A dapper Swedish lecturer in religion spoke of Méphistophéla (1890), a French novel in which lesbian demon-worshippers offer baskets of severed penises to a female succubus. A Spanish researcher, Leire Barrera-Medrano, described the fiction of Emilio Pardo Bazán, decadent, feminist, theosophist, aristocrat and the author of The Black Siren (1908), the story of a devil-worshipping dandy with the power to compel people to commit suicide.

I was reeling. Suddenly, Proust’s mental time travel and Freud’s interest in telepathy made sense. Here was the lost, weird context of European modernism. Most of it, frustratingly, untranslated into English.

With one notable exception. Emilio Pardo Bazán’s The House of Ulloa (1886). A novel from her early period, written long before she developed an interest in hypnotism and the Black Mass. Back in the 1880s, she considered herself a naturalist in the style of Flaubert. But she was also a state of the nation novelist. That nation was her native Spain, and its state was decay.

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The hero of The House of Ulloa is a mimsy young priest, Father Julián Alvarez, who is despatched to a crumbling estate in the Galician sticks to inject a little order and piety into the affairs of its resident marquis. Some hope.

As he arrives at the manor like a comic, clerical version of Jonathan Harker at the beginning of Dracula, he sees a dirty four-year-old boy, the marquis’s illegitimate son, being bitten by a dog from whose bowl he has attempted to snatch a hunk of meat. The marquis consoles the lad by sluicing wine down his throat. The boy seems delighted to be drunk. “On certain feast-days,” stammers Father Julián, wondering if he is about to witness a sudden death, “I don’t dislike a little anisette with my coffee.”

Like many great novels, it’s possible to read The House of Ulloa for the food. Bazán doesn’t mind tarrying in the kitchen. Her flavours are strong and she gives us all the details. Chicken casseroled in an egg-yolk sauce. Cauliflower salad and quince jelly sent in from the local convent. Mataburrillo, a stew of goat’s tripe, liver and lungs. Bread soup, cooked slowly in fat with red sausage, chickpeas and sliced hard-boiled eggs.

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The political background, though, is just as piquant. We’re in a period of turmoil and uncertainty. The Glorious Revolution of 1868 has propelled Queen Isabella II from the Spanish throne. A Provisional Government has been formed. Its Prime Minister, Juan Prim, has been shot by an unknown assassin. Radicals have declared a republic, brought swiftly to an end by the installation of Isabella’s son, Alfonso XII, as constitutional monarch. Local politicians – as far as Bazán is concerned – are hopelessly self-interested. Spain is sinking into a post-imperial dream-state, while these men manoeuvre for power.

A pair of figures receive Bazán’s cool attention. Barbacana is a lawyerly bigwig who fights his battles from behind a desk, leaving the violent stuff to a wall-eyed henchman from Castrodorna. (Clearly bandit territory.)

The more dangerous of the two is Trampeta – “the Trickster” – a man so promiscuous in his deceptions that the electorate simply can’t keep track of them. (“Thanks to the extent of Trampeta’s machinations,” we’re told, “many of the things he did were winked at, or a blind eye was turned to them.”)

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By John Lichfield

There is strong music in his name. When Bazán’s narrator declares that Trampeta “felt certain of impunity, even if he were to burn down half the town and beat up, sue or imprison the other half”, you wonder if this part of Galicia has a Fifth Avenue. You may also find yourself speculating about how to inhabit a culture like this, which seems not to know whether it is alive or dead.

Bazán was in in love with death. As time went on, her passion increased. She was one of those writers who greeted the fin de siècle by embracing the outré and the esoteric. Despite her devout Catholicism, she even defended the practice of Satanism. “To believe in the devil is to believe in God,” she wrote in 1911. On my day with the Decadence Research Unit, Leire Barrera-Medrano offered a way to interpret Bazán’s position. Her engagement with the occult, she suggested, “was a necessary spiritual expurgation”.

These, I suppose, are the seductions of decadence. To gaze upon the process of decay, feel a melancholy pleasure, and nurse the idea that at some point in the future, new life will flower.

Recently, I sat through a lunch where four people had a searing argument with one another, despite agreeing on both the facts and the principles at stake. Each wanted to use those same facts and principles to prove themselves right, and their opponents wrong. The lunch was in Westminster of course, where professional arguers go to make a living.

But this mood of toxic intransigence has spread far beyond the dining rooms of SW1. The whole country’s political conversation is now characterised by extremism and outrage, pomposity and arrogance. So my prescription for your summer is to learn to let it go. We need to find a new way of talking to one another, with respect, compassion and humility. And there’s no better place to start than the works of Marshall Rosenberg, who created the concept of nonviolent communication.

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First off: order the book online. If you see the book in its physical form, before you buy, I strongly expect you’ll walk away. I feel a powerful sense of dread when I see the cover of any of Rosenberg’s books, which are branded to look like the absolute worst kind of sanctimonious self-help guides. They sit alongside the Power of Now, the Miracle of Yes, the Tao of Toenails, and all sorts of other tedious tomes. They look at home next to a display of healing crystals and incense, as if they’re full of the sort of fake news wellbeing puffery peddled by Gwyneth Paltrow on her Goop website.

But give Marshall a chance. Give Marshall a chance, because he teaches us how to give each other a chance: how to use language not to oppress or subjugate, or prove our own superiority, but to genuinely communicate and engage.

When you follow the principles of Nonviolent Communication, you listen to and respect the words and feelings of your counterpart. You ask thoughtful questions, to unpack, clarify and understand your counterpart’s motivations and values. You don’t dismiss, attack, or resort to defensive whataboutery. As the author explains in his introduction:

“We are led to express ourselves with honesty and clarity, while simultaneously paying others a respectful and empathic attention. In any exchange, we come to hear our own deeper needs and those of others.”

I’m not going to give you a full primer here, not least because I’m still a novice myself. Until recently, one of my favourite books was Schopenhauer’s The Art of Always Being Right. It’s a tremendous read, entertaining and full of great tips for any aspiring political orator. Plus it has a natural appeal to me and my ego. Who doesn’t like being right after all?

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But Schopenhauer’s book isn’t actually a lesson in being right. It’s a lesson in winning an argument in front of an audience: a kind of performative rightness that bears little relationship with what we might call objective truth. It could be, and perhaps is, the handbook of our current crop of political leaders, interested mostly in appealing to a group of people who are already on their side, with a succession of rhetorical tricks to make the other guys look ludicrous.

But that indulgence is causing our political discourse to disintegrate into tribal warfare, where none give credit to the other side even for good intentions, let alone the occasional good idea. We are caught in the language of outrage, where virtue is signalled to one’s own tribe by the violence with which we condemn our enemies and opponents, and whether we looked good while we did it.

Schopenhauer has seductive appeal, but it’s time to set his book and what it stands for aside. Schopenhauer is cake: delicious but dangerous in large quantities. Marshall Rosenberg, by contrast, is a kale smoothie. Hard to swallow, but curative of many ills.

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Is Harry Potter an apologist for neoliberalism?

By Polly Mackenzie

We need to learn the art of listening to each other. The Right needs to understand that Jeremy Corbyn is not wrong about everything: there are real questions that the advocates of capitalism must answer, whether they’re about inequality, the environment or workers’ rights. But the Left needs to understand that Theresa May was not wrong about everything either: she was a champion for race and gender equality, she drove an ambitious industrial strategy, and she secured more than £20bn extra for the NHS.

And if liberals want to return to power, they will need to learn to listen to the worries and demands of those let down by the technocratic policymaking of the past 30 years. You don’t need to agree with everyone, or change your mind to accommodate every new opinion you come across. But you can be a leader who shows compassion: who listens deeply, and without prejudice, to understand those who disagree with you. In the end that’s the only way we will be able to build consensus.

So eat cake on your holiday. But when it comes to your poolside reading, indulge your soul with something more meaningful. If we all came back in September with just 10% more compassion for our political opponents, we might have a hope of that unity our new Prime Minister has promised us.

Kafka, like Orwell and Dickens, belongs to that select band of authors whose name has become an adjective. “Kafkaesque” is a term most often used to describe an overweening bureaucracy or system that traps an unwitting individual in an illogical, nightmarish maze, governed by complex forces beyond his or her control. I suspect that as Kafka is more widely and heavily evoked as an adjective, the detail of what he wrote is less frequently considered. We think we know what he says. We’ve got the gist.

There is, however, perhaps no other author who catches so keenly the confusion and distress of individuals who have lost all confidence – and sense of their own rights – in a system that appears to be operating according to its own unknowable rules, which are riddled with failings so familiar that they are now factored into expectations.

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The Trial, in particular, is acutely relevant to our current age, in which our criminal justice system – once internationally renowned – is in a deepening state of crisis. Meanwhile, away from courts, informal ‘trials’ with inconstant rules and outcomes have become a frequent feature of both social media and company policy.

These latter ‘trials’ – although they lack legal force – nonetheless have the power to ruin a life: to destroy an individual’s reputation, to sink current and future prospects of employment, and in some especially bleak cases to push those involved towards suicide.

The Trial, written in 1914-15 and first published posthumously in 1925, begins with the line: “Someone must have been telling lies about Josef K., for without having done anything wrong he was arrested one fine morning.” Thereafter, K. finds himself immersed in an interminable and terrifyingly hazy case in which he is the defendant. There is something particularly chilling about such an opening line, because precisely the type of event it describes is familiar from immediate UK history.

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The fantasist and paedophile Carl Beech has recently been jailed for perverting the course of justice – “telling lies,” indeed – by falsely alleging that a string of public figures were involved in a paedophile ring reportedly characterised by rape, torture and murder. Beech’s testimony was given weight by the senior police officer in charge of the investigation who declared his evidence “credible and true” on national television without awaiting the outcome of the ongoing investigation.

In the face of Beech’s unsubstantiated accusations, a lifetime of service to the state apparently counted for nothing. One of those accused by Beech was Field Marshal Lord Bramall, a hero of D-Day, who – in a searing recent interview with Dominic Lawson – described the circumstances of discovering that he was a suspect in an ongoing investigation.

He was having breakfast in March 2015 with his late wife Avril, who was then in the advanced stages of Alzheimer’s disease, when two police officers arrived at the door. They said: “Accusations have been made.” He asked: “Against whom?” They answered: “Against you.” In Lord Bramall’s words:

“All they would tell me was that 40 years ago I had abused an underage male. And at that moment they showed me a warrant, and 20 policemen in overalls came in and they searched this house for 10 hours.”

His lawyer later found out the charges, which included the most lurid accusations, such as “supervising the torture of small boys on Salisbury Plain”.

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Lord Bramall lived long enough to see Beech imprisoned, although his distressed wife did not. Nor did Leon Brittan, the former Home Secretary: he died of cancer before hearing that his name had been cleared.

Paedophiles do exist, of course, and so do paedophiles in positions of public trust. Allegations from complainants need to be properly investigated. What distinguished the Carl Beech case from other cases – what made it worthy of a Kafka plot – was the willingness of the police to court publicity while openly abandoning due process and the essential principle of ‘innocent until proven guilty.’

Those caught up in Operation Midland had both the misfortune and the good luck that it unfolded in the public eye. Misfortune, because their status amplified the pain and shame of being stained with such appalling allegations, and good luck because it ensured that the case was at least subjected to press scrutiny and their exoneration was decisively publicised.

Yet it begs the question: how many more injustices are routinely pursued, largely unseen, against those who have few resources with which to counter them? The protections of our criminal justice system have long been intended to guarantee that all accused are treated equally in the eyes of the law. But those protections have been steadily eroded on a number of fronts. Kafka’s imagined world creeps ever closer.

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In January this year, The Law Society submitted a parliamentary briefing on a “criminal justice system in crisis”, which it argues has been caused by “years of underinvestment and neglect”. The challenges it cited included increasing shortages of duty solicitors; a restrictive means test for legal aid; inefficiencies in the system; more and more courts being closed; and crucial evidence often not being disclosed.

To take but a single example, the role of criminal duty solicitor – the person you can call for professional advice if you are being held in a police cell – is now so badly paid that younger lawyers are refusing to go into it. The youngest duty solicitor on the Isle of Wight is now 55 years old. She is understandably concerned about what happens to the rights of suspects once she retires.

The rates that criminal barristers are paid for undertaking legal aid cases are often less than £100 for a day’s work, out of which they must pay travel costs and fees to chambers. Many are finding that – despite an extensive education, for which they have usually incurred sizeable debts, and working long hours – they cannot afford even a modest mortgage out of their professional salary.

Young barristers are therefore leaving crime work in their droves for commercial or corporate practice. There is no area of the law in which the stakes for the individuals concerned are so high; yet those lawyers who remain in criminal law see cases being postponed and court buildings and their machinery crumbling.

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It is impossible to avoid the suspicion that the ongoing underpayment of criminal barristers and solicitors, the degradation of the infrastructure in which they operate, and the squeezing of public access to legal aid itself, is driven by an unspoken but resolute political intent. In one passage in The Trial, Kafka describes the surreal and miserable conditions in which the Advocates (those who represent defendants) work:

“It wasn’t saying too much if the Advocates called these conditions scandalous. Complaints to the authorities had not the slightest effect, and it was also strictly forbidden for the Advocates to make any structural repairs or alterations at their own expense.”

The narrative voice offers the reasoning for this situation:

 “Still, there was some justification for this attitude on the part of the authorities. They wanted to discourage defending counsel as much as possible, the whole onus of the Defence must be laid on the accused himself.”

Does this sound a fanciful translation from fiction, if applied to our current circumstances? Perhaps not when one considers a policy that is already in place, dubbed ‘the innocence tax’. Those who are above the threshold of legal aid funding – in the magistrates’ courts, anyone with an annual household income of £22,325, and in the crown court, above £37,500 of disposable household income – are currently compelled to fund their own defence privately, often at a considerably higher rate than legal aid fees.

Should they then be acquitted, however, the government will only reimburse them at legal aid rates (a deliberate policy: before 2012, they were allowed to claim back “reasonable costs”). This can leave people, after acquittal, with a large outstanding fee which in some cases has led to bankruptcy or the loss of life savings.

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The former Commons deputy speaker Nigel Evans experienced this personally, when he was acquitted of charges of rape and sexual abuse but lost his life savings in the fight to clear his name. He has since said:

“People don’t see people like me as victims, and there’s a sense that it could not happen to them. That’s what I thought too, but it’s completely wrong. There’s nothing easier than someone falsely accusing you of a crime.”

It has long been accepted that if one has the misfortune to be wrongly accused of a crime, a conviction is disastrous. Now, thanks to the ‘innocence tax’, so too might be the aftermath of acquittal.

Our legal system is the ultimate guarantor of individual liberty. It should be the last line of protection against the arbitrary persecution of the state, individual malice, and the passing mores or prejudices of wider society. The law should be broadly immune to contagious emotions or fashionable ideology.

Today, legal independence seems more necessary than ever, as the shifting traps of judgement and taste that are laid by social media – the complex blurring of private and public life – can have life-altering consequences for the unwary.

In June this year, for example, a 54-year-old disabled grandfather, Brian Leach, was fired from his job at Asda for posting an anti-religious skit – which mocked both Christianity and Islam – by the comedian Billy Connolly on his Facebook page. Asda, which itself sells Billy Connolly DVDs, said that he had breached the company’s social media policy. Leach was summarily dismissed, despite having deleted the post and apologised for any potential offence to colleagues.

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That the behaviour of the police can also be influenced by perceived public mood was evidenced by Operation Midland: it is widely thought that the misplaced eagerness to find Beech’s testimony “credible and true” was in part a reaction to the bad publicity generated by the acknowledged previous failure of the police themselves to investigate sexual abuse allegations properly in relation to Jimmy Savile and others.

Recently the police also appear to be taking a worryingly keen interest in patrolling lines of opinion and argument – resulting, for example, in a bizarre case being brought earlier this year by West Yorkshire police, Essex police and the CPS against Miranda Yardley, a self-identified transsexual, for ‘harassment’ allegedly motivated by ‘transphobia’. It is worth noting that while Yardley, the defendant, was and is transsexual, the complainant was not trans, but a ‘trans ally’: the origin of the complaints was a spat on social media.

District Judge John Woollard dismissed the case against Yardley in a one-day hearing, saying there was simply no evidence, and awarding costs to the defence. In his blunt summary: “There is no case and never was a case,” something that neither the police nor the CPS were apparently able to perceive within a ten-month investigation.

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Meanwhile another recent development has been worrying solicitors, who witness clients increasingly trapped – like the unfortunate Josef K. – in a legal limbo without apparent end: the rapid rise of the phenomenon of ‘released under investigation’ (RUI). Criticism of the pre-charge bail system – in which suspects were endlessly bailed and re-bailed without their case being resolved – led to bail being widely replaced with RUI.

This is arguably much worse: unlike with bail, there are no fixed calendar dates whereby suspects can discover the progress of their case. Instead, a suspect’s relationships, studies or career must be placed on hold while the case stagnates or inches forward. The suspect will be notified at some point of the case’s direction, but he or she will have no idea of exactly when that might be, and nor are the under-resourced police under any formal obligation to tell them within a given time-frame.

When the Law Society Gazette ran an article on RUI recently, anonymous solicitors spoke below the line of their own experiences. One read: “I’ve had one client RUI for 25 months and counting and the case is not yet even at the stage of being sent to the CPS for a charging decision. That will be a minimum of another four months, so the case might yet break the three year mark in due course.” It goes without saying that such delays also grievously affect the lives of complainants.

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For those of us who are not routinely involved with the criminal justice system, such stories crop up troublingly and drift away again. They do not touch our lives – until one day, perhaps, they do indeed affect us or our loved ones, with catastrophic consequences.

Yet something is going profoundly awry with the justice system in the UK, and if it is not understood and addressed as a coherent picture – which it is – it will have deeply corrosive and long-lasting effects. Start, if you like, with reading or re-reading The Trial, and then listen out for its many echoes today.

Those echoes keep on coming, right up until the miserable moment of Josef K.’s death. Two men in frock coats and top hats come for him eventually, officials of the state with malign intent, and K. asks himself: “Where was the Judge whom he had never seen? Where was the High Court to which he had never penetrated?”

One man holds him down, one stabs him, and then K. watches them watching him die: “’Like a dog!’ he said: it was as if he meant the shame of it to outlive him.”

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Well, we must all be wary of hysteria and exaggeration. Frock-coated officials are certainly not stabbing suspects to death in the UK today. Yet still those stubborn little echoes persist – “like a dog!”.

An inquest jury concluded this July that the death of Rafal Sochacki, a 43-year-old Polish national, on 21 June 2017, was most likely due to him being subjected to excessive heat. Sochacki had been arrested on an extradition warrant and was being transported in a prisoner-escort services van, a task outsourced to the private company Serco, on one of the hottest days in central London for over 40 years.

The van stopped outside Charing Cross police station, holding Sochacki in a cell inside the vehicle for 50 minutes with the engine and air conditioning turned off. He was then taken to court at 10am, soaked in sweat, and put into a very hot, unventilated cell: the air conditioning at the court had not worked for weeks, and mobile air-conditioning units were proving ineffective.

Rather like K., in fact, he never got to see the judge or the court. Having been noted as behaving oddly and erratically, he was finally found unresponsive in his cell at 2.45pm, having died of severe heatstroke and hypertensive heart disease.

And it is strange, because when I read about the circumstances of Sochacki’s death, my very first thought was that there might have been a greater public outcry if a dog had been treated in this way.

Michel Serres, France’s most popular, and most widely recognised, philosopher, was a kind of intellectual Johnny Hallyday.

If Hallyday was France’s “national rock-star”, Serres, a bargeman’s son, was France’s national thinker. Both men were similarly besieged with the adulation of their countrymen even though this was an age when French intellectuals were no longer lauded like pop stars.

Serres was unusual for a French philosopher – and unusual for a philosopher of any kind. He wrote best-selling books. He was a purveyor of hope. He adored the modern world. He was very amusing. He had a treasure-trove of anecdotes from his many lives as a naval officer, academic, mountain climber and TV star (of which we will presently hear one, involving President Charles de Gaulle and a giraffe).

Since he died in June, aged 88, two of Serres’ most recent books have re-entered the French bestseller’s list. One of them, La Petite Poucette, was translated into English in 2014 as Thumbelina: The Culture and Technology of Millennials.

The other, its 2017 sequel, c’était mieux avant! (everything used to be better), is currently available only in French.

The two books make overlapping arguments.

No, the world is not going to hell in a hand-basket. Young people are not separated from reality by their mobile phones. They are better informed and more engaged than any previous generation.

Democracy is not doomed. Au contraire, it is the old model of top-down, “tyrannical” or fake democracy, which will not survive the era of social media, Wikipedia and mobile phones.

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Serres saw the gilets jaunes (yellow jacket) movement, which arose just before he died, as a symptom not of typical French grouchery but a sign of a new and welcome popular unwillingness to accept that the “big people” know best.

Long before Greta Thunberg, Michel Serres forecast that the young would save the planet. Unlike their parents or grandparents, he said, coming generations would no longer place the human race on a self-defeating pedestal above other forms of life. They would develop a “Natural Contract” (the title of another book written by Serres 20 years ago) which would re-establish human beings as partners, not destroyers, of other species, both animal and vegetable.

Here is a short passage from c’était mieux avant, which, though clumsily translated by me, captures something of the power of Michel Serres’ writing.

“This is the real law of the jungle – that you must at all costs avoid complete victory. Only mankind fails to grasp this point… As the day of our triumph approaches we will be forced to leave our pinnacle and reduce ourselves to the ranks of other living things if we want to survive… Quickly, quickly or we will die.”

Serres published more than 80 books. He was one of the 40 “immortals” of the Académie Française. He was trained in mathematical, scientific and literary-philosophical disciplines and tried to break down the popular and academic barriers between them.

He detested what he saw as lazy arguments about the dangers of modern communications, social media and the internet. As a son of the labouring classes and a child of the 1930s and 1940s, he hated suggestions that life had been “better before”.

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By Tom Chivers

When exactly was it “mieux avant”, his 2017 essay asks? When Hitler, Stalin and Pol Pot were murdering millions? When simple arguments about family and faith disguised widespread violence and sexual abuse? When women spent their lives in drudgery? When unthinking snobbery meant that his working class, south-western accent was mocked openly by his academic superiors and colleagues?

Mieux avant, a short book easily read by anyone with reasonable French, is a kind of socratic dialogue. “Grand Papa Ronchon” (Grumpy Granddad) defends the past. He is opposed, or educated, by Thumbelina, the millennial teenager from his previous bestseller, whose fast-moving thumbs can summon up a world of knowledge denied to her predecessors.

Mostly Serres agrees with Thumbelina. Occasionally he becomes Grumpy Granddad. He excoriates, for instance, the generic ugliness of the mall-sprawl on the edge of all French towns. In that case, he says, life was “better before”.

The two books have been criticised as too optimistic and simplistic – a 21^st century reincarnation of Voltaire’s Dr Pangloss. “All is for the best in the best of all possible worlds”.

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There are many contradictions and counter-arguments that Serres fails to address. He believes the “new dictators” – he lists Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin, Brexit and Isis – will ultimately be defeated by a new, engaged, well-informed, grassroots, internet democracy. He ignores the evidence that the internet has been exploited by Trump, Putin, Isis and others to impose a new autocracy, founded on fake news. He dodges the possibility that many Thumbelinas are not following world events on their iPhones.

All the same, Serres is a stimulating and refreshing antidote to the pervasive gloom of the age. He says that humanity, to survive, will have to learn to think small. He also believes that only bold and sweeping ideas can succeed.

The importance of thinking big is the point of one of his favourite anecdotes.

In the early 1960s, Serres was a teacher at France’s most elite academic institution, the Ecole Normale Supérieure, when the president of a newly liberated African colony visited President de Gaulle.

Two students at ‘Norm Sup’ stole a giraffe from the ménagerie in the Paris fifth arrondissement. They placed it in a truck and drove it to the Elysée Palace. Questioned by the police on the gate, they explained that it was a present to De Gaulle from the African leader.

To the subsequent fury of “le général” and his then prime minister, Georges Pompidou, the truck and the giraffe were allowed to enter the palace courtyard.

Serres saw two morals in the story. Humour justifies nearly everything. It is impossible to refuse something as big as a giraffe.

I’ve never been good with death. Which is not to say that I am afraid of dying. In fact, I almost did when I was very young; I was run over by a truck when I was only five. Hours of surgery followed, then weeks of treatment, months of rehabilitation, and a lifetime with scars and aches and body parts that don’t match.

No. It’s not the idea of my own death I don’t like – if He came to sit beside me for a while, I like to think that I wouldn’t plead or bargain or upend my chair to get away. We would talk civilly. There would be no chummy chess match, but a bow of the head and an acceptance that every day since that first dodge all those years ago was an indulgence.

It’s other people’s deaths I’ve always struggled with.

The first one that really hit me wasn’t that of an elderly relative or a much-loved pet. There was no “he had a good innings” or “it was a blessing, really”, to comfort myself with. He was a classmate at school. We were 15 and one day he just fell down dead from a heart condition that no one knew he had.

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I went to the funeral. I had promised myself I wouldn’t – I had told myself I wouldn’t be mawkish or voyeuristic. But, at the last minute, I changed into my school uniform – to deflect any challenge that might come my way as to why I was there – and walked the two miles from my village to the church where the ceremony was held. It was my first funeral. I didn’t cry.

Or, at least, not in the church. Or by the graveside as ropes jerked the coffin into the gaping maw of a hole. It didn’t hit me till months later. The grief came mixed up in the challenge most teenagers face at some point, when the old certainties of faith fall away. When the picture-book bible stories of heaven and hell don’t work any more. It’s when you realise a belief isn’t true just because you want it to be.

Death was all over the news that year. The Labour Leader John Smith had passed away, a chinook helicopter crashed in the Mull of Kintyre killing all on board, and police started pulling bodies out of the ground at 25 Cromwell Street, Gloucester, the home of Fred and Rosemary West.

It was also the year my English teacher started talking to us about some of the bigger questions in life. I remember answering a question on military service with total assurance that, yes, I would be prepared to die for my country. But I wasn’t sure I’d be able to kill for it, which is a much harder thing to do.

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I remembered those words over and over when I joined the territorial army and was taught several dozen ways to kill – from calling in air support, to laying down 81mm mortar fire, to finding out why bayonets need a blood channel (so a sucking wound doesn’t make it impossible to withdraw it from the enemy to use again).

I’d joined up after a journalism job took me to Kosovo to see the UK peacekeeping and nation building efforts at the end of the war there. It was the first time I’d seen brain matter: the residue of a sniper’s bullet. It smelled cloyingly sweet. I was 22.

From such a halting and uneasy beginning, my relationship with death has become much more pedestrian. I grew up in a family so rooted in its Presbyterianism and unwillingness to “make a show” that only the funerals of blood family and deep rooted friendships were acceptable (anything else risked emotional tourism). Yet I now head an organisation where it is expected of me to represent the Party, and sometimes even deliver the eulogy, at the funerals of colleagues, activists or former parliamentarians.

Each person has their own morbid path. My partner, a native of County Wexford in the south-east of Ireland, saw her first dead body when she was nine. It was her uncle. After the undertakers had taken him away to fix and to fill his body, they brought him back to be laid out on the bed he died in, to be visited by near enough the whole town for his wake.

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This cultural norm seems to have caused her no ill harm. Nor did – after losing both her parents as a teenager – taking a comb to her dead father’s hair as he lay in an open casket, because the funeral home had given him the wrong parting.

We all question, we all wrestle with the unfairness of a premature visit paid to someone we love, we are all hurt and we all die. But from first encounter to final resting place, the paths themselves are very different depending on our age, our religion, our culture.

Sue Black takes us on her own journey in her new memoir, All that Remains. An anatomy professor and forensic anthropologist who lives with death every day, she walks us through the murders she had worked on as a Home Office expert: from the war crimes she pieced together from unearthed mass graves in the Balkans to holidaymakers she repatriated after helping lead the international response to the Boxing Day Tsunami in Thailand and Indonesia.

She also invites us to sit by her mother’s bedside in her final hours as she and her daughters sing: “She’ll be coming round the mountain when she comes.” It was an extraordinarily uplifting scene. You would expect it to be bleak; but it is warm and it soars. It reduced me to tears on the red-eye shuttle to London City Airport; the besuited businessman next to me self-consciously offered me his hanky between sniffs.

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And it’s a necessary book too. Our responses to death are changing as our relationships with it change.

I’m pleased that young journalists coming up don’t have the same trauma of doing death-knocks that I had – ringing the bell of the recently bereaved to ask if they have anything they can say about the departed or a photo they can gift to the paper. The worst one I ever had to do was for a boy who was walking his dog in a graveyard in a downpour, only for some long-forgotten mineworkings to collapse and the mud to swallow him whole. Nowadays, three clicks and Facebook supplies it all.

Yes, better for work, but on a personal level, it feels like the ‘RIP’ messages on Twitter for every pop star that passes or actor that leaves the stage hollows out the meaning of grief. That flowery prose – designed to be widely read – is no substitute for the awkward handshake and “thanks for coming” at the crematorium line-up. “Well, you know, he was a good man. And a good friend.”

That’s why this book is a good and welcome friend. And Sue Black is a good guide. It’s a hug at the wake followed by that special time, weeks later, when a night time drink brings back all the old memories – and laughing stories, lightly told, start to heal old wounds.