Post-Truth by Matthew d’Ancona (Ebury Press, £6.99)
As d’Ancona admits, “Trump stalks the pages of this book like an orange panther”, but this isn’t about him, or even the far right. It’s concerned with an attack on rationality itself, of which Trump is a symptom rather than the cause. The present devaluation of knowledge, objectivity, accuracy and evidence has come not, as George Orwell feared, from totalitarianism, but a much more complex web of factors. This slim volume offers a succinct summary of how we’ve got here, explaining how climate change deniers were able to model their strategies on those of the 1950s tobacco lobby, and finding further precedents for the post-truth world in anti-Semitism and our old friend post-modernism. He also offers suggestions as to how to fight back, calling for a diligent, informed population prepared to wrest civic responsibility back from the political class – which, since he claims civilisation as we know it hangs in the balance, isn’t a prospect to fill one with confidence.
Matthew d’Ancona is at the Edinburgh International Book Festival on August 23
Chance Developments by Alexander McCall Smith (Polygon, £7.99)
The seemingly inexhaustible McCall Smith has been inspired here by five old black-and-white photographs, letting his imagination fill in the stories that might have lain behind them. All five are love stories, because “love lies at the heart of our experience of the world”. Flitting between Scotland, Ireland, Canada and Australia, he introduces us to: a nun who inherits money and leaves her convent with her sights set on finding a man; an artist whose first romance leaves an indelible mark on his life; an Irish schoolteacher who spies a woman in a fancy automobile and decides she’s the one for him; an odd young man who is determined to make a career out of fortune-telling; and a first-generation immigrant to Australia who learns to find contentment despite a difficult and undistinguished life. Written with the apparent effortlessness that is such a hallmark of McCall Smith’s style, they’re highly approachable, heart-warming and, in places, quite moving tales.
Alexander McCall Smith is at the Edinburgh International Book Festival on August 17
Dismembered by Polly Toynbee & David Walker (Guardian/Faber, £9.99)
In an undisguised and unashamed “paean of praise” to the public services, Toynbee and Walker look behind the rhetoric calling for a smaller state to examine the often chaotic and confused ways in which the public sector has been pushed and pulled by successive governments over the last 30 years. Surveying the wide range of services that fall under the public sector, they also examine how these formerly cherished institutions have lost the nation’s respect, not least as a result of politicians attacking the civil servants they were ostensibly working with. The authors look ahead to Brexit too, for which the vast amount of manpower and skills required will drain talent and resources from the daily business of running the country. Their argument that “free enterprise only flourishes within a strong public realm” is a persuasive challenge to the prevailing dogma that the state is a drain on the taxpayer’s purse and a hindrance to a vigorous private sector.
Polly Toynbee & David Walker are at the Edinburgh International Book Festival on August 26 EIBF
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