Book Reviews

How had thinking so simple, clear, direct, deep and traditional found a voice on BBC and gone viral on YouTube? This lay behind my ordering Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson’s new book on how to live your life that I imagined would be in a different league from other self-help books. I wasn’t disappointed so that the book set me to inner dialogue with the social activist, indulgent parent and softee churchman that’s me. This showed I was following two of the author’s twelve rules: ‘treat yourself like someone you are responsible for helping… assume that the person you are listening to might know something you don’t’. I struggled with the individualist focus until I grasped it would be the natural approach of a psychologist i.e. set your own house in order before you criticise the world (another of Peterson’s rules) and the book’s being marketed as self-help. As the author opened up how social activism can be fuelled by grievance more than generosity I recalled spiritual couns...

The best we can do is try to be better and kinder ourselves; to remember how much it is sheer courage that usually gets people through disappointment and heartbreak; and to recognise how the greatest disruption to our well-ordered plans is often love, occasionally regretted but usually embraced and invariably transformative.  These modest words about basic ambition typify the autobiography of Chris Patten, former Chairman of the Conservative Party, last Governor of Hong Kong, European Commissioner for External Affairs, Chancellor of Oxford University, Chairman of the BBC, advisor to the Pope - as he self-deprecatingly puts it a Grand Poo-bah, the Lord High Everything Else. The autobiography of a conservative liberal challenges a political culture in which a thick skin of prejudice, reinforced by reading the tabloids, is proof against the dilemmas of the real world. Patten writes: I am a Conservative who has never believed that everything my party does or stands for is r...