Photo (cc) Ana­log Pho­tos.

Phil sent me a link to the Amazon UK page for the new book by Richard Little­john. He’s a hack for the Daily Mail, a news organ­isa­tion that makes Fox News look fair and bal­anced, so I thought that Phil’s recent trip to Syria had left him with men­tal trauma. Not so. You’d expect the book to pick up mixed reviews. On the con­trary it’s pick­ing up wide acclaim, and masses of five star votes. Here’s a sample of the 5/5 reviews:

No-one else can express such com­plex right wing views in such a mono­syl­labic form.
To buy only one copy of this book would be a crime.

With this insight­ful, vis­ion­ary, and — I am not ashamed to say — celes­ti­ally inspir­a­tional com­ment­ary on mod­ern life, Richard Little­john has rendered the entire canon of West­ern lit­er­at­ure, philo­sophy and eth­ical dis­course entirely moot.

Littlejohn’s book is so bril­liant that when, as is inev­it­able in mod­ern Bri­tain, a gay immig­rant made an attempt to steal it from my bag it lit­er­ally burnt his hands and made them dis­solve a little bit.

There are those who credit Plato with defin­ing that obscure and fluc­tu­at­ing arte­fact which has been termed the ‘west­ern mind’. Per­haps we might admit the philo­sophies of Jesus of Galillee and Freid­rich Niet­zche into that élite club of thinkers who have con­trib­uted to its fur­ther elu­cid­a­tion — but never before has a work emerged of which we can tri­umphantly declaim: Plato is obscured, we have our new republic!

I recently died and went to heaven. This book bought me back.

Little­john steam­roles through everything wrong with our coun­try– keep­ing people safe, re-using rub­bish, etc.- in a bril­liant style that evokes Dick­ens at his best.

Fur­ther­more, I have read Tol­stoy, and yes, this does indeed turn into Tol­stoy– i for­get where exactly, but some­where between pages 204 and 206.

Hav­ing cre­ated a new paradigm in non-fiction lit­er­at­ure, as awe­some in its sweep as it is remark­able in its vis­ion, the only ques­tion that remains is where will Little­john go from here?

If you like Little­Johns opin­ions I urge you to get some­body to read it out aloud for you, priceless!

If you only buy one ill-focussed, obvi­ous, point­less rant at the expense of easy tar­gets who would prob­ably need to board up their win­dows if any of the people who sup­port Little­john could actu­ally read, then make it this one.

The reviews are amaz­ing, and there’s over sev­enty of them.