Originally subtitled 'On the Art of Living in the Merciless Order of Modernity', the writing in Zest adds up to a pattern book for intellectual and emotional survival in this fractious age. The book opens with Hieronymus Bosch in the Garden of Eden, where we share with him the first fruit. It takes us by way of writers, artists, philosophers, travellers, photographers, flavours and musicians into the world of Zest - how we can find it and what its discovery does to us. Bamforth's sensuous, richly nuanced essays affect us as stories do, each one creating a world in which its arguments live and...