25 NOVEMBER 2006, Page 42

A NTHONY D ANIELS J. G. Ballard’s Kingdom Come (Fourth Estate, £17.99)

is a dyspeptic vision of a dystopian Britain that has already halfarrived. He is a close observer of our national malaise: indiscriminate consumerism combined with a sense of entitlement, and therefore of resentment. His profound understanding of the place of the teddy bear in our national life made me laugh.

Bruce Clark’s Twice a Stranger: Greece, Turkey and the Minorities They Expelled (Granta, £20) is a brilliant, subtle and very moving exploration of the ironies of modernisation and nationalism in Greece and Turkey. Greek Moslems were deemed Turks, and Turkish Orthodox deemed Greek, and expelled from their ancestral homes accordingly. Yet another painful reminder of man’s inhumanity to man.