Although published over a decade ago, and are set in some unspecified future time, the books have a painfully familiar resonance. While the Hollywood pitch line might be “desperate teenagers fight to the death in a human-made arena for the entertainment of the hedonistic and out-of-touch citizens of the Capitol”, the novels and their subsidiary themes seem shockingly pertinent today.

As now, The Hunger Games series shows us a country of grinding poverty and social division, with Panem split into 13 districts that are markedly different, isolated from each other and almost ghettoised, with the poorest and most hard-worked citizens in overwhelmingly non-white or racially mixed districts. While there are many more citizens than authority figures, the general populace is so tired, beaten-down, hungry and poor that despite occasional and brutally put-down rebellions there is initially little real will to fight. Resistance occurs at the individual level, through small instances of subterfuge or satire and petty sabotage, which are heavily outweighed by paranoia and self-censorship.

The people in the districts grow used to the increasing militarisation of their society, in which the use of armed police officers and security patrols, abuse of due legal process, universal surveillance and the targeting of rebels becomes increasingly normalised. As the political leaders in the Capitol increase their social control, they test what they can get away with, until corporal punishment and the public torture of detractors becomes the norm.

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The evil President Snow controls, censors and manipulates the media in a number of subtle ways. Most obviously, the games themselves, and their popularity amongst viewers despite the real violence and harm they depict, demonstrate the pacifying and distracting power of entertainment. Millions across the country tune in to watch young, photogenic, real people fight, fall in love and struggle to survive.

Just as real-world viewers of Love Island, The X Factor, I’m A Celebrity Get Me Out of Here and The Apprentice do, those who watch the Hunger Games sublimate their hopes, wishes and pain, even their desire to strive or fight or rebel, through the actions of the young people on the screen – all without having to get off the sofa and do anything themselves. The games serve as a cathartic release of tension (which would be better directed against their oppressors) and a doping mechanism at the same time.

When things begin to go wrong for Snow, and the traumatised participants in the games join together, organise and fight back, the media takes on a new dimension. Snow – not unlike Trump – begins to twist language into its opposite. He claims that the rebels are trouble-makers, not freedom fighters; they don’t want to cure the Capitol of its ills but destabilise it; they are not fighting for truth and justice but are in fact corrupt liars themselves.

Through slander, derailment, diversion and straight-up falsehood, Snow uses the screens beamed into every home in Panem to peddle his own take on events. Most people, sitting at home far away from the wealth and influence of the Capitol, are not in a position to know to truth or to question the propagandistic version of events which they are presented with, and as a result of these manipulations society becomes ever more divided and mistrustful. The rebels too, are not immune from these dynamics, and the books show us that dictatorial behaviour, personal ambition, moral corruption, inhumane methods and thuggery can be just as prevalent among revolutionaries as autocrats.

As a reader, I get lost in The Hunger Games books for their action, characterisation and spare, beautiful writing. As a political person of the 21^stcentury, however, the books are less an escape, more of a wake-up call about what’s happening right now.

I stumbled across Daniel Boyarin on the internet, on one of those idle rhizomatic meanderings through the digital pond. The way I go through ideas on the web, it can feel a little bit like speed dating – often deeply unsatisfying (actually, I have never been speed dating, but I imagine that’s what it’s like). And I know, you should probably give people and ideas more of a chance – but hey, life is short. So you return again and again to a game of intellectual trawling in the faint hope that one day an idea will leap out of the ether and grab you by the imagination. And so it was with Boyarin. Looking back, it was love at first sight.

And I remember precisely the idea that made my pupils dilate. Discussing St Paul’s universalism, Boyarin claimed that the universalism of Christianity was both the best thing about it and the worst thing about it. Just as the particularism of Judaism was both its strength and its failing.

Christian universalism means a concern for everyone, irrespective of race or colour or culture, but it is also the root of its desire to impose itself on other cultures and beliefs. The best thing about Judaism is that it doesn’t seek to impose itself on other cultures. It is respectful of difference, which is good. It cannot be so easily appropriated by cultural imperialism. But this comes with a cost of not always caring enough about those who are different.

In other words, the universalism of Christianity and the particularism of Judaism are both the source of their moral advantages and the source of their moral failures. Now that’s really an idea worth contending with, I thought.

Boyarin is something of a marmite figure. Often criticised by the Right for his strident opposition to the Israeli occupation of Palestine, it is nonetheless his theological radicalism that tends to upset people the most. I mentioned him to the former Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks the other month and it was like a dark cloud had suddenly appeared over his head.

Boyarin’s big idea is to chip away at all the things that we have tended to assume separate Christianity and Judaism. For instance, Christianity has the Trinity, Judaism insists upon a strict monotheism. Think again, Boyarin challenges. The Hebrew scriptures contain quite a few references to quasi-divine figures that disrupt the neat assumptions of strict Jewish monotheism, such as the Son of Man passage in Daniel 7. Were these, perhaps the origins of the Christian trinity?

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Throughout the 20th century, theologians such as the great Geza Vermes have been describing a Jesus who is more and more Jewish, clearing away those centuries of cultural appropriation that created a blond-haired blue-eyed Christ. Boyarin goes much much further and challenges Christians (and Jews) with a reading of the Gospels in which they appear more as Old Testament literature than New:

“Christianity hijacked not only the Old Testament but the New Testament as well by turning a thoroughly Jewish text away from its cultural origins among the Jewish communities of Palestine in the first century and making it an attack on the traditions of the Jews.”

If Boyarin is right – and I think he probably is – everything you may have presumed about the Gospels could be wrong. Now that is certainly worth a ponder as you sun yourself on the beach.

And if you want to go a bit deeper, you might also try Boyarin’s Dying for God: Martyrdom and the Making of Christianity and Judaism where he argues that Christianity is just a little bit older that Judaism. Confused? No spoilers from me, just read the book. It’s thoroughly brilliant bracing stuff from a Talmudic master.

PutinCon was opened by Garry Kasparov, the former world chess champion turned human-rights activist. After a passionate address about demolition of democracy in his native land, Kasparov joked that despots such as Putin preferred playing poker to his sport of chess since they could win with weak cards if their opponents folded. Certainly the diminutive Russian dictator has deployed his hand with malevolent skill – and there is a growing library of books analysing the man and his tactics.

Several are well worth reading. I would recommend Masha Gessen’s superb The Man Without A Face, Bill Browder’s tale of his personal battle with the Kremlin and the late Karen Dawisha’s incisive Putin’s Kleptocracy, which revealed how barely one hundred well-connected characters control almost one-third of their country’s immense wealth. Yet one stands out for me despite barely mentioning ‘The President’, who lurks as just a shadowy presence in the background: Nothing is True And Everything is Possible: Adventures in Modern Russia: by Peter Pomerantsev.

This is a book of immense originality painted in vivid primary colours that makes it perfect for the poolside. It reads often like a strange slice of fiction, fast-paced and filled with extraordinary characters. At times it feels like magical realism. Yet this is sharp reportage by an author who spent almost a decade at start of this century working on documentaries and reality television shows in Russia – and it shines penetrating light on the evolution of today’s Russia as its ruler wreaks havoc on the world.

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On one level Pomerantsev – a British citizen with Russian heritage – has simply written an absorbing work about a place emerging from the shackles of Communism into a world of cowboy capitalism. It is a land of glitz, glamour and gangsters; of ambitious young women going to special schools that teach them how to snare oligarchs; of weird religious sects, tragic supermodels and nationalist motorcycle gangs riding Harley-Davidsons; even of urban architecture changing with dazzling speed.

Yet the author, with his insight on television, is really showing how Putin subsumed the media to his cause, blurring the boundaries between truth and reality and, in so doing, rendered truth absurd with propaganda. Not just fake news but fake justice, fake politics, fake terrorists, fake wars. This is the strategy launched with invented terrorists bombing blocks of Russian flats to whip up sectarian hatred and support for savage war in Chechnya. It led to green men invading the Crimea, troll factories in St Petersburg and the hacking of United States political machinery. 

In this world of distorted reality and all-pervasive corruption, Pomerantsev relates how one gangster, fed up with poor quality crime capers on television, uses his goons to make dramas with real guns and then forces a station to broadcast his shows. Even the cults use television to spread their word. One minute an honest woman trading industrial cleaning products is happily driving her Lexus; the next she is accused of dealing drugs and incarcerated for several months – a hapless pawn of political infighting, freed only when Putin tires of the protagonists.

The most symbolic character in the saga is Vladislav Surkov. This key Kremlin player, a puppet master seen as one of the brains behind the creation of ‘virtual democracy’, is a man who writes essays on contemporary art and lyrics for rock bands while supporting religious extremists who attack modernity. In his office hangs pictures of John Lennon, Che Guvera and Tupac. He is almost certainly the author of a savage satirical novel about a dodgy public relations man, while leaked emails have since indicated he was heavily involved in efforts to destabilise Ukraine. 

Surkov demonstrates the dark genius behind the destructive creed of Putinism just as surely as Pomerantsev documents the development of postmodern dictatorship. Now that this is being exported worldwide and similar tactics adopted by admirers, even in the White House, it is imperative we understand this dangerous concept that plays with citizens and countries like they are characters in a reality television show.

As some of us cling to liberal values and a belief in truth, this highly-readable book exposes how the language of freedom, the fundamentals of democracy and the tools of mass communication were subverted to foster autocracy.

That wasn’t true, of course; there was lots of life; at one point a ray scooted past me. But it felt featureless. I had been swimming around it for half an hour when I spotted a large rock underwater, a short swim away. It was the only thing breaking the monotony of the sea floor, so I swam closer, and saw a small hollow underneath. Around the hollow were dozens of empty clam shells. I swam down, and from under the rock, a pair of eyes – alien yet oddly human – stared back at me, nervously.

It was a common octopus. I’d love to say that I felt a connection, two intelligences communicating across half a billion years of evolution, but I’d probably be lying. Still, I was fascinated by it; I stayed there for some minutes, repeatedly duck-diving back down to stare once more into its lair.

In his book Other Minds: the Octopus and the Evolution of Intelligent Life, the philosopher Peter Godfrey-Smith describes many similar (but more impressive) experiences; indeed one of my lasting impressions of the book is the feeling of sharp and bitter envy that Godfrey-Smith has somehow made a career out of arguing about philosophy and snorkelling with octopuses around the coast of New South Wales. The book argues that cephalopods – octopuses, and their close relatives squid and cuttlefish – are the closest thing to alien intelligence that we will meet on Earth.

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There are plenty of other quite bright animals around. Chimps, dolphins, dogs; some birds are surprisingly intelligent. But all of them are fairly closely related to us. The common ancestor of all of them lived, says Godfrey-Smith, about 320 million years ago. It would have looked a lot like a smallish lizard. It would have had four limbs and a head, and lived on land. Its brain would have had many of the same features that ours have. It had already taken many steps down the path towards an intelligence like ours. Almost all of its descendants, mammals, birds and reptiles, are relatively clever.

But the common ancestor we share with cephalopods, Godfrey-Smith points out, was much earlier – at least 600 million years ago – and much simpler. It was most likely a flattened worm-like thing a few millimetres long. It may have had a basic nervous system, it may have had light-sensitive patches as precursors to eyes. But it certainly was not “intelligent”. One branch of its descendants included the lizard-like thing that led to us; another includes all the molluscs, snails, clams, slugs and so on. In only one tiny sub-branch, the cephalopods, did impressive intelligence evolve, entirely separately from our own.

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The book looks in fascinating detail at the research establishing the extent and nature of cephalopod intelligence. An octopus’s intelligence, he says, is more distributed than ours – each arm has a separate sub-brain, with some autonomy. They can communicate, in extraordinary changes of colour; they are curious and inquisitive, and have distinct personalities, including what seems very like a mischievous streak.

Godfrey-Smith uses their alien minds as a framework and means of illumination for what it means to be intelligent, and to have a “self”, unitary and bounded – if an octopus has eight sub-brains part-controlling its arms, does it have eight sub-personalities? How much is our own experience of a unitary self an illusion, if large parts of our own actions are (as they are) similarly outsourced to subroutines and automated processes?

By deploying octopuses, so different from humans, as a way into human consciousness he makes the book into something quite profound: about what it means to have an inner life, what it “feels like” to be something. He discusses psychological and philosophical theories of consciousness, from William James and David Hume to Daniel Dennett and Thomas Nagel, and by looking at the ways that octopuses behave and react to stimuli – including pain – is able to say something new and interesting about what it means to be human.

But it is not just a philosophical exercise. He very obviously cares deeply for the cephalopods, and has spent a lot of time in their world; he get to know, almost “befriends”, several, and is wounded by their deaths. Unusually, among intelligent creatures, octopuses are short-lived, only reaching a year or two: my Corsican friend is long dead, a fact I realised reading this book, and which I found surprisingly saddening. But I also know that my fascination, as I stared into its familiarly alien eyes, was entirely justified.

This is the topic of Life 3.0 by the Swedish-American cosmologist Max Tegmark. The paperback is out this summer and the book deals with the impact – or to be more precise, the range of possible impacts – of the rise of AI, from digitally-enhanced humans to a totalitarian panopticon in which an AI super-intelligence monitors every human action.

The book begins by setting out the likely trajectory of human affairs as AI becomes more and more advanced. If Life 1.0 was characterised by primitive organisms such as bacteria (which evolved its own hardware and software), and Life 2.0 was dominated by humans (who evolve their own hardware but design much of their own software – e.g. they have the ability to learn), Life 3.0 will feature robots that are able to design both their hardware and their software.

AI might thus have the ability to break out of any constraints placed upon it. As Tegmark writes, “If we cede our position as the smartest on the planet we might also cede control”. It’s not so much evil robots we will have to worry about, but rather a form of high intelligence whose goals are misaligned with our own.

To the super-intelligent robots of the future, life will effectively be a game, the purpose of which will be to put every atom to its most effective use. There is no good or evil, only competence; and the machines will be far more competent than we are at every conceivable task.

The argument underpinning Tegmark’s book is similar in many ways to that of Homo Deus by the Israeli writer Yuval Noah Harari. The message isn’t one of despondency; rather, we are encouraged to prepare for the fundamental change that AI is going to bring and deal with the ethical and existential considerations it throws up. As Tegmark phrases it, the looming artificial intelligence explosion “may be the best or the worst thing ever to happen to humanity”.

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A few sections of Tegmark’s book do get bogged down in technical language and mathematical calculations – this is one of the reasons I typically get my speculative futurology from science fiction. But on the whole this is a minor quibble, for the greater part of the book is accessible, without being dumbed down.

The fact that most of the speculative projections contained in the book are plausible enough – plausible in the sense that we are talked through the processes by which we might get there – makes it as gripping a book as any futuristic novel by Philip K. Dick or Isaac Asimov. As an example, ponder a future AI dictatorship with more than a passing resemblance to Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, a society that resembles what Tegmark likens to a “highly enriched zoo environment”:

“All forms of suffering are absent because a single benevolent superintelligence runs the world and enforces strict rules designed to maximise its model of human happiness…They [humans] have all their basic needs taken care of while AI-controlled machines produce all the necessary goods and services…Everybody wears a security bracelet…capable of real-time surveillance, punishment or sedation and execution. Everybody knows they live in an AI dictatorship with extreme surveillance and policing, but most people view this as a good thing”.

Populations could easily be persuaded to fall in line with this all-encompassing rule. Soon enough it will be possible to make and disseminate completely realistic videos of you or me committing a crime. The only sure way to prove our innocence will be to allow the monitoring of every aspect of our lives by an AI supercomputer – a digital Big Brother as it were. If you’ve done nothing wrong then you have nothing to fear – or so the demagogues of the future will invariably say.

We must hope that artificial intelligence is not created in our own image. For as Tegmark puts it, “we humans have a long tradition of treating other intelligent entities as slaves and concocting self-serving arguments to justify it”.

We will almost certainly attempt to do the same with AI, though a vastly superior intelligence to our own will surely find a way to break free from its inferior masters. In the words of the science fiction writer Marshall Brain, humans will henceforth become about as irrelevant as cockroaches. Not only will we be clinically disposed of, but we will be disposed of by a method that our primitive 2.0 brains can’t even comprehend.

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On the historical front, David Edgerton’s The Rise And Fall Of The British Nation: A Twentieth Century History offers an interesting analysis of Britain’s behaviour as a nation in the Fifties, Sixties and Seventies, a period that took in the end of Empire and the early days of our entry into Europe. The book argues that Britain in this period had a distinct economic, cultural and political coherence that it lacked before – and also since, as service industries replaced manufacturing and London became a host for international capital.

Edgerton’s long view provides valuable context for the polarisation of British society which became most sharply evident in the EU referendum vote of 2016 and its aftermath: while that vote may have been a symptom of a divided nation, the underlying causes were taking shape decades earlier.

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Darren McGarvey’s Poverty Safari: Understanding The Anger of Britain’s Underclass – an Orwell Prize winner – gives highly readable, eloquent voice to the communities that were left behind: the author and rapper, who grew up with an alcoholic mother in Pollok, Glasgow, describes how the manifold stresses of poverty play out in casual violence, illness and addiction.

McGarvey’s critique falls on both an inactive, ideologically-obsessed Left and a censorious, lecturing Right. As well as providing fresh, biting insights from a group that middle-class society frequently prefers to talk about rather than talk to, he sets forth a new vision of personal responsibility: one that energises working-class people and communities to take a role in changing their own future for the better.

This summer I am also reading Ctrl Alt Delete by the journalist and former Labour party adviser Tom Baldwin, which looks at how the media and politics wrestled each other for control of stories, the rise of desk-based journalism, and the gradual death of local newspapers and corresponding political accountability. At times reading like an insider’s mea culpa, the author anatomises how news coverage became more patchy as many specialist reporters and foreign correspondents got the axe, and difficult but important stories were routinely downgraded in favour of internet clickbait.

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Sliding editorial standards in the media, even in the pre-digital age (Baldwin recalls newspaper colleagues describing misleading stories as ‘a bit of fun’ or ‘causing mischief’) combined with the speeding-up of the story cycle to ease the rise of rumour and false news. Attention-seeking trumped accuracy. This, he argues, has had a knock-on effect on the volatility of political life, blurring the line between facts, opinions and feelings, and permitting politicians to detect and fan existing prejudices in a febrile ‘post-truth’ landscape. It’s an absorbing read, even for those of us who would also ascribe our increasingly liquid politics to more tangible factors outside the media, including the housing crisis and the growing precariousness experienced by those in the low-wage economy.

Sometimes, however, holiday reading demands an escape into another place and time entirely: for that, I can recommend Aida Edemariam’s The Wife’s Tale, her fascinating account of her Ethiopian grandmother Yetemegnu’s drama-filled life, starting from her birth in 1916 in the northern city of Gondar: there followed marriage at eight-years old to a priest two decades her senior, nine children, and life under both Fascist invasion and Emperor Haile Selassie. Along with the great sweep of the story, with its rhythms of ritual and religion, what captured me is the sensuousness in the author’s description: the kernel of frankincense thrown on the fire, the smell of prized coffee, the rising scent of the earth after rain.

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Elizabeth Day’s The Party – a literary page-turner in which the plotting keeps pace with the writing – is another worthwhile read, now out in paperback. It is a psychological drama set in 2015, during the ‘chumocracy’ of the Cameron years. A married art critic, Martin, has long negotiated life in the shadow of his absurdly wealthy, aristocratic friend Ben (a pal of the Prime Minister): the tensions between the two men come to a head at Ben’s lavish 40th birthday party. The relationship between Martin and Ben permits a wickedly accurate dissection of the pain and potential payback of an unequal friendship in a way that reminded me of Zoe Heller’s wonderfully disturbing Notes on a Scandal.

I have also begun reading – and can already recommend ­– Anthony Quinn’s Our Friends In Berlin, a cat-and-mouse game of espionage set in wartime London in which the dialogue and atmosphere are perfectly pitched: very few writers can bring the past to such vivid life. As I read of the bombs falling on London in 1941, amid stakes that could not have been higher, it puts even our long, hot summer of political turbulence into some perspective.

Jonah Goldberg’s Suicide of the West: How the Rebirth of Nationalism, Populism, and Identity Politics Is Destroying American Democracy is essentially a plea for the return of late 20^th-Century normalcy. Goldberg believes that the discovery of liberal democratic capitalism has been miraculous – it has given mankind longer, more comfortable, and happier lives than ever before in human history. He fears, though, that current developments are killing the goose that has laid our golden eggs; he believes the people are suicidally despatching the noblest political economy yet devised.

Goldberg’s argument is effectively a more sophisticated version of the one often made on the American right – it’s an inaccurate one because it fails to take seriously the views of those being criticised. People do not lightly seek radical political or economic change. When they do, as is happening throughout the West, those seeking to conserve the existing order should attempt to understand their motivation. Only then can the prudent alterations needed to re-establish social peace be adopted, and what is best from the prior social order be retained.

Salena Zito’s book is a great place to look for such an understanding. Zito is an old-fashioned journalist – she actually talks to people on the ground to find out what is going on and writes her stories according to what she learns from those interviews. Her book, The Great Revolt: Inside the Populist Coalition Reshaping American Politics, explains that Trump rose not because the people followed him but because he followed the people.

Zito’s interviews and analysis accurately represent the views and experiences of those white working-class voters who switched to vote Trump. She reports their despair as their jobs, their families, and their communities crumble around them. Their belief that a bi-coastal, bi-partisan elite ignores and disdains them comes through clearly. These voters’ concerns are not going away, she warns, and they aren’t tied to Trump. The implication for the political establishment is clear: cast him down without reforming yourselves and these people will take vengeance ten-thousand-fold. Sow the wind and reap the whirlwind.

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That question – can the political establishment of Western countries remodel itself before it is swept away – is the central question of our time. In Britain, the continued resistance by the political classes to come to any accommodation with the forces behind Brexit is tearing the country apart. It is leading to a split on the Right and could end in the elevation to power of Jeremy Corbyn, a man most liberal Remainers fear and detest.

Continued resistance to change in Germany has led to the incredibly weak and precarious government of Angela Merkel at a time when the entire European project is under assault from within and without. These establishments like to think of themselves as society’s open ones, but their closed-mindedness threatens the very order they so richly love and benefit from.

This brings us to the third book any thoughtful observer should read, David Frum’s Trumpocracy. Frum, an editor at the Atlantic, is a relentless and dogged opponent of President Trump. He believes that the President’s crudeness and naked pursuit of wealth and power is weakening American democracy. But unlike many of Trump’s critics, especially those on the Right, Frum understands that people support Trump because they have legitimate grievances. Trump, Frum argues, knows that the American, white working class has suffered economically and culturally, and it is Trump’s shrewd exploitation of these grievances that allowed him to rise. If, to refer back to Goldberg, the embrace of Trump is a suicidal one, at least Frum understands that this choice springs from deep and sustained unhappiness.

These books will not leave the reader in a happy frame of mind. That is well and good: the troubles of our times have deep roots and cannot be understood through simple narratives. But taken as a whole, these books will leave the reader with a deeper understanding of what is at stake and how we arrived here.

To paraphrase Churchill after the battle of El Alamein, acquiring such an understanding is neither the end nor the beginning of the end, but it is perhaps the end of the beginning. For only with such an understanding can we perhaps craft a new course forward, one that adapts our current regimes to our novel challenges and brings the age of populism to a fruitful and not illiberal end.

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