Jolly modern reading: "Expo 58" by Jonathan Coe.

I knew I would like this book from its shamelessly retro cover and the knowingly B-movie enticement of the words printed below the title: "Spies, girls and an Englishman abroad. Trust no one." Except of course, this Englishman trusts everyone. But more of that anon.

In any case, this looked like excellent summer reading fare, and so it turned out to be, at the same time a cut or two above the Kingsley Amis style pastiche which it could have been - and which, frankly, would probably have kept me happy for a day or two anyway. I say that advisedly: ever since I greedily read PG Wodehouse novels as a teenager, I have harboured a weakness for tales of a rather innocent, terribly-English hi-jinks from a bygone age. At one level, Coe certainly delivers that: his protagonist is the quintessentially naive, rather staid young chap (barely conscious of his own extreme handsomeness - plot point there) thrown in way over his head to an exotic foreign world (Belgium!), teeming with glamorous women, Cold War intrigue, Russian spies and dangerous modernity. It is a world where an agreeable roommate is a "decent sort of cove", a young woman is encouraged to continue smoking during her pregnancy to calm her nerves, spies do wear raincoats and trilby hats and where an olive, let alone the dry martini into which it is dropped, is an impossibly decadent foreign novelty.

So far so pastiche, but, as I say, it goes a bit further than that.

Counter-intuitive reading: "David and Goliath" by Malcolm Gladwell

Here we go again. Why do I keep buying books by Malcolm Gladwell? They always leave me a little enlightened and rather more irritated. It always goes pretty much the same way: starting with a remarkable counter-intuitive story, then the central insight of the book, explaining why the counter-intuitive makes perfect sense, followed by anecdote upon anecdote broadly reinforcing the idea.

The trick should be either to read the first chapter and leave it there, or to read an article somewhere summing up the argument. What adds self-inflicted insult to injury in this case is that I did have that summary before I bought this book, in the form of an item on the excellent TED Radio Hour podcast I heard in which Gladwell explained his take on the David and Goliath story. And I still bought the book! It was prominently displayed and well marketed in a bookshop, and, yes, the TED talk had indeed made me eager for more. Except, of course, you don't really get more. or much more at any rate.

So what's the interesting idea at the heart of this book?

The subtitle actually gets you quite a long way. In full, the book is titled David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits and the Art of Battling Giants. The central idea is that what we would normally consider an advantage: e.g. being big and strong, getting into the best possible university, being in a small class, having the full might of the state at your disposal, is not necessarily an advantage at all. Conversely, what we might consider a disadvantage: e.g. being small and weak, being dyslexic, having no tall players in your basketball team, belonging to a persecuted minority, can perversely be an advantage. 

Through anecdote and, in some cases, quite a lot of statistics, Gladwell shows how the counterintuitive switching of advantage and disadvantage in his anecdotes actually makes a great deal of sense and can be explained in the most rational terms.