Books

JOHN MOORE finds out to what extent the state wants to amass information on every citizen in Britain - and it's already started.

IF you're anything unlike me, you will know "the OC" - Orange County, California - from the teen soap aired on Channel 4. I've never seen the dratted thing, so all I have is the vague impression of wealthy Yanks with great teeth and computer-generated hair arsing about in Mercedes Benzes having affairs and voting Republican.

GERMANY and Colombia had business links going back to 1919, so, when Hitler came to power, it was natural that some German-Jews found refuge in Colombia.

THESE tales from Edinburgh's town jail, with their litany of inventive torture and execution, might have chilled the marrow in the past, but we know only too well that past ages had no monopoly on human barbarism.

JOHN MOORE gets to grips with the bare facts about the forces working to keep wealth and power in the hands of the minority.

AMONG the many factors that have undermined faith in Gordon Brown's new Labour government, growing public doubts over its management of the NHS have been a substantial factor - and this new and valuable volume goes to the heart of one of the most damaging policy initiatives arising from Alan Milburn's 2000 NHS Plan.

THE total annihilation of Smyrna, the modern Izmir, by Kemal Ataturk's Turkish forces triumphing over the defeated Greek army in 1922 was described by one eyewitness as having "scarcely a parallel in the history of the world for hideousness and danger."

IN Helen Oyeyemi's novel, Maja is the daughter of a black academic Cuban father troubled about the revolution, who came to London when she was five. Now, she is an outwardly confident 20-year-old, pregnant and deeply in love with her boyfriend Aaron, a young white doctor who was born in Ghana.

I AM all for radical anthologies. It's good to dip into a tome for easy entertainment, but the selected items have to carry weight without reference to the surrounding prose. If we simply cite Joe Bloggs who said "religion is baloney," where does that get us?

GORDON PARSONS reads Noam Chomsky's view on everything from religious fundamentalism to the threat to the environment.