Being Interested: Amateur Reports on Books and Ideas

In my experience it is rare to come across a book that is entirely without merit; rarer still that I would actually own one. At worst, some books qualify as being  almost completely useless, without quite going all the way. Even the stupidest book I’ve ever read, Three Horsemen of the New Apocalypse  (1997) , written by the five-foot-tall, super-conceited, ultra-reactionary, Indian-born Anglophile Nirad Chaudhuri, provides some useful insight into how political thinking works in the absence of intelligence. (Chaudhuri is the subject of a chapter in Clive James’ Cultural Amnesia , which I guess makes sense). Luckily, I've been able to extract something, even if it is something small, from all the books I own.  L. T. Hobhouse’s Social Evolution and Political Theory (1911), which I ordered via Abebooks late last year, is on the whole not a satisfactory book. This is mainly due to its datedness. The lengthiest chapter is a very mild critique of eugenics that gives the i