Book review: The Sense Of Style, by Steven Pinker

The Sense Of Style
Steven Pinker (Allen Lane)
★★★✩✩

Steven Pinker is an dazzling thinker, an excellent writer and a brilliant matchmaker of the two - marrying complex ideas to simple English.

This has not happened by chance. He has studied hard to make his writing appear easy and now wishes to share his learning.

Stage review: Great Britain, Haymarket

Great Britain
Theatre Royal Haymarket
★★★✩✩

All the ills, woes and scandals of Britain's tabloid press are distilled, mixed with bile and chucked at the audience of the Haymarket with infectious glee in Richard Bean's state-of-the-nation farce.

Working Mum: In the desert of my social diary, how can two key events collide?

GUEST BLOG

By Tabitha Ronson

For my birthday my friend announced that she had bought me tickets to see Kate Bush at Hammersmith.

At first I was speechless, unable to believe what I was hearing. This stunned silence was soon broken by one almighty squeal that lasted rather longer than was necessary.

Spiral Notebook: After a flight of fancy, down to earth with a bump

Unless you have wealth, webbing or feathers, there is little glamour left in air travel.

The humiliation of the consumer is one that no other service would demand save perhaps Apple with an iOS upgrade or the NHS and its proctology (with whom, tellingly, air travel has a weird kinship).

Spiral Notebook: David, Goliath and the sickening politics of scorn in Tower Hamlets

You may believe that Tower Hamlets mayor Lutfur Rahman is right to challenge the Government's investigation into alleged financial malpractice at the Town Hall.

You may believe that the council's publicly funded bid for a judicial review is a necessary David-and-Goliath battle to protect a fragile branch of democracy from Eric Pickles' Communities Department.

Book reviews: Scarcity, The Gods Of Guilt, The Young And Prodigious TS Spivet

Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much
Sendhil Mullainathan and Eldar Shafir (Penguin)
★★★✩✩

The authors have a "big idea", another in the newly popular field of behavioural economics. The nudgers and freaks are joined by the lackies - those who live with scarcity.

Film review: A Most Wanted Man (15)

A Most Wanted Man
(15) 122mins
★★★✩✩

Director Anton Corbijn's sombre spy film is dressed in graffitied concrete, kebab shop neon and cold steel blue.

Spiral Notebook: The line of least resistance

Tower Hamlets charity Real has a strong chance of claiming the disabled services contract that was initially won by out-of-towners Pohwer.

Art: How Turner squared up to the oblong tendency

Late Turner: Painting Set Free
Tate Britain

For the longest time pictures were brick-shaped. Photographs in an album and portraits on the wall were often pre-figured to the Golden Ratio, that pleasing aspect that had mathematical as well as aesthetic qualities.

Art: Clare Woods on her commission for London's river services

Cranky and Idler may sound like sneaky nicknames for your deadwood colleagues but in the hands of artist Clare Woods, they are shimmering takes on the River Thames.