There was a napkin athwart the counter at Think Coffee (on Mercer and 4th) while I was reading Kerry Howley’s baroque, brilliant, mystifying and mythifying book. I only mention the napkin because some Think Coffee customer had drawn on it a rather neat graph of the history and quality of philosophy. If the mystery graphist had not helpfully jotted ‘History and Quality of Philosophy’ next to it I might have taken it for a diagram of the fiscal state of the Greek economy or a prophecy of the next stock market crash. It did not look entirely healthy. Thrown is the story (fictional? non-fictional?) of that graph.

It also purports to be an intimate, eyewitness account of the travails of a couple of fighters on the mixed martial arts circuit in the US from the point of view of Kit, a graduate student in Continental philosophy at the University of Iowa. At first it reads like a more metaphysical Fever Pitch (Nick Hornby), with a dash