Barthes for Beginners, by Philip Thoday and Ann Course (Icon Books, £8.99 in UK)

Ah, yes: the days of wine and roses, signifiers and signifieds, codes, constructs and clarity. With its determinedly deadpan tone and occasional, almost hysterical, moments of levity, the For Beginners series - Joyce has been done, and Hegal and Picasso, as well as the Holocaust, Ecology and Quantum Theory - will delight some readers and drive others demented. This Barthes is not the one I idolised in college, which may have something to do with Ann Course's baffling penis-on-every-page illustrations: mimetic illusion, how are you.