that a great deal of his life would have been different had he been born white.” The section on Dante is similarly smart, snappy and wise, though we could have done with a few more translations. But Jackson is so charming an MC, so considerate a host, that you end up rather seduced by his very personal introductions to a variety of cultural icons from Hildegard of Bingen to Andy Warhol for whom even so persuasive a writer as Jackson can’t quite make a case. His entries on these figures are alphabetically presented, which somehow works beautifully. Like all sincere propagandists, Grayling presents his heresy as a dispossessed orthodoxy: superstition, in his analysis, has hijacked the humanism of antiquity. So when Marcus Aurelius or Socrates spoke of the divine, they were only referring to physical or psychological laws beyond their ken, not to a Big Bad Other who was itching to condemn them for breaking tribal taboos.As an alternative history of Western thought, all this is fascinating. But Grayling believes that a silly superstition deserves silly treatment.

He ignores or distorts anything that conflicts with his thesis: St Paul, the Hellenised Jew who converted the Greeks through his knowledge of Greek culture, is described as an example of everything Greek culture was not That doesn’t strike me as very scholarly. But this book reminds us that often the greatest disagreements are between priorities rather than principles.Letters of Introduction by Kevin Jackson (CARCANET £9.95) Under normal circumstances I would be “introduced” to Nietzsche only on condition that I could wash my hands immediately afterwards. What is good? by A C Grayling (WEIDENFELD £7.99)
There are two books here. The first is an intelligent, radical work of popular philosophy; the second a dishonest piece of populist materialism.

Grayling sees the history of Western ethics as a battle between a morality based on obedience to an imagined deity, and one which springs from informed enquiry into human concerns. He’s picked out the latter as a thread running from Thales and the Roman stoics, to Darwin and his followers. There are two books here. But they focus on issues or problems that are relevant to growing businesses. Martin Johnson, the man behind the graphic design company Satellite, talks about managing the transition from being a one-man company to having a team and learning from mistakes, while Steven Greenall of music publisher Warwick Music looks at selling online.The comments of these and other viewpoint contributors are probably more powerful than the supposedly inspirational quotations from generally much more famous entrepreneurs collected in the following section: “50 Pearls of Entrepreneurial Wisdom”.This book is as useful for the established entrepreneur suddenly confronting a particular issue as for the fresh-faced would-be tycoon.. This apposite advice is made more powerful by succinct lists of other helpful sources of information and cross-references to other sections of the book.The “Viewpoints” section at the heart of the book features less well-known case studies than the usual suspects that turn up on such occasions.

Readers looking at the early section on assessing their entrepreneurial profile can quickly scan between the positive – “Making it Happen” and related aspects, such as “check that you have the right idea”, “develop a detailed business plan” and “get financial backing for your idea” – and the negative – “What to Avoid”, namely “setting up equal partnerships”, “having inadequate people and planning” and “relying too heavily on one or two customers” for starters. Certainly, this 558-page work covers everything that an entrepreneur could want to know about – from whether he or she is cut out for running a business, through protecting ideas, to getting out at the end It could have ended up as a dry reference book. But to the credit of Bloomsbury and the top-rank contributors involved – including corporate governance sage Sir Adrian Cadbury, management thinker Meredith Belbin and marketing guru Malcolm McDonald – it avoids this.The key to its success lies in the clear lay-out of the “Actionlist” sections. Some of the discoveries that alter our perspective have been made very recently. It was only in 1986 that David Bernstein suggested that the two winged lions that appear in the border near Duke William suggest that he is Nebuchadnezzer, and that England’s subjugation, like that of the Babylonian Jews, will not last. It is by no means impossible that further discoveries wait to be made One does hope so.. It is a little difficult to understand why Bloomsbury sees the need to add to the pile of advice tomes for SMEs.