Of the Scottish philosophers of the Enlightenment, David Hume was the wittiest, most bonhomous and most delightful. Of the French philosophers of the 18th century, Jean-Jacques Rousseau was the most prickly, provocative and paranoid. In 1766, on the run from the French and Swiss authorities, Rousseau, with his dog Sultan, was hustled to London by Hume. His mistress followed him, escorted by James Boswell. This is the story, entertainingly told, of the bewilderingly bitter quarrel that arose between Rousseau and Hume and ripened into an intense intellectual enmity.

THE ROMANIAN by Bruce Benderson
Snow Books, £7.99

The Romanian is Romulus, a 24-year-old street hustler picked up in Budapest by Benderson, a fiftysomething Jewish-American journalist. Both, disaffected by cultural exploitation and erotic disorientation, acquiesce in an unsafe, self-deceiving sexual relationship. Benderson’s uncontrolled mid-life crisis finds romantic adventure and obsessive focus in his unrequited passion for Romulus, through whom he discovers the chaotic contradictions of a Romania struggling from gothic isolation into global opportunity. This lush, lurid, lyrical, lacerating, sweetly unrepentant memoir won the Prix de Flore.

PENGUINS STOPPED PLAY by Harry Thompson
John Murray, £12.99

Thompson died last year, too young. He devised the TV series Have I Got News For You and Never Mind the Buzzcocks, wrote a Booker-longlisted novel and managed a maverick amateur cricket team, the Captain Scott XI, which he took on a shambolic tour that aimed to play cricket on every continent. It’s a wonder, judging by this batty, wickets-for-wits tale of how “eleven village cricketers take on the world”, that anything as trivial as rain or light stops play. Penguins can queer the pitch much more efficiently: every team should have them.

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