The essays and reviews are succinct informative and always reasonable

The essays and reviews are succinct, informative and always reasonable. You can almost imagine one of the 18th-century salon women Grayling so admires acting as his guiding spirit. The order of essays parallels the order of evenings and guests – arts, history, science – and with a similar purpose in mind That purpose is enlightenment. Hitler’s aesthetics of power and Goering’s looted art treasures, the artistic achievement and formidable engineering skills of ancient Mesopotamia, the Faustian excesses of contemporary architecture, multicultural relativism and patriotic elitism, Shakespeare, Goethe, what makes history and the Bible’s lack of it, Freud, Moses, Edward Said, how ideas can shape history but sociology doesn’t understand ideas, why extraterrestrials aren’t science, and the theory that unifies relativity and quantum mechanics: these are only a handful of the topics that the philosopher AC Grayling contends with in this polymath’s feast of a miscellany.You could do far worse than spend an evening or three in the company of this book. Second: any abstract system of ideas will generate its own contradictions.

Or, to put it another way, Zeno was right.Ziauddin Sardar’s memoir ‘Desperately Seeking Paradise’ appears this spring from Granta. It’s not exactly pop-star behaviour, and you soon realise that the time lag between her albums was due to the down-to-earth matters of craftsmanship and doing a job properly “I just didn’t want to make a bad album,” she says. “So many of my favourite bands have made dog second records, you know? I was a bit nervous, but only because I wanted to learn my craft. Although I produced both of the records, I was only pretending to know how Now I sort of know. What’s more, when it came to recording, she played drums, guitar, bass and piano on various tracks, taught herself how to produce, and worked through 12 engineers and eight studios between New Zealand and America along the way.Adding a few more strings to her bow, Runga is driving herself around England when we meet, doubling as her own tour manager and driver for a solo support slot on a tour with Aqualung.

(Both contributed to Beautiful Collision, Finn with some particularly choice humming on the track “The Be All and End All”.) Having been road-tested, the songs were ready by the time the dates were over. Runga spent three of them trying to get the songs right, driving herself “a bit crazy” in between perfecting her piano and guitar playing. Eventually, she took a break by embarking on a triple-headline tour with Neil Finn, formerly of fellow New Zealanders Crowded House, and her home country’s pop godfather, Dave Dobbyn. When the then 19-year-old, Chinese-Maori singer-songwriter released her debut album, Drive, in 1997, it became the biggest-selling homegrown record in the country’s pop history. The album was pretty good, too, with its crisp torch-pop song-writing overcoming any faintly MOR-ish hints. Leap forward five years, and Beautiful Collision was finally released in New Zealand in 2002, reaching the UK last year. Its sales have outstripped its predecessor’s already, but more importantly, its songwriting is streets ahead, breezily combining blissed-out balladry with a bit of swing, the eerie beauty of Stina Nordenstam and subtle operatics on 12 impeccably turned-out songs about the comings and goings of romance.Those five years weren’t wasted, then.