Why is everyone so obsessed with food? How did chefs come to be the gurus of the age? And what’s with serving chips in a beaker and slivers of vegetable on hot stones? This polemic against “foodies” and their oral fixation pits Jamie Oliver against Jacques Derrida, and sees the author eating a nitro-frozen bolus of olive oil, marvelling at food fashion, and descending into the ninth circle of foodist hell at MasterChef Live. It’s out now in the UK & Eire, Australia, and North America. More information here.

Modern political speech is weaponized rhetoric. Words and soundbites smuggle in unexamined arguments, from “community” or “death tax” to “intelligent design”, “war on terror”, and the need to “reassure the markets” in times of financial crisis. On publication in 2006, Unspeak’s forensic analysis was called “required reading” by Slate, “compelling” by the Daily Telegraph, and “crap” by Alastair Campbell. The book is supplemented with new examples at its long-running blog.

Videogames are a new artform, but what kind of artform are they? This book, called “seminal” and “groundbreaking” on its first publication in 2000, teases out the relationships and differences between videogames and cinema, storytelling, the history of painting, architecture, and semiotics, from Spacewar! to Ocarina of Time and beyond. Trigger Happy became an influential text for game studies, and also generated a BBC4 documentary and a long-running column in Edge magazine.