It must have seemed like a good joke to the Books editor to ask me, the person in charge of readers' complaints and queries, to review a slim volume on complaints so soon after we launched a redesign of The Times; the complaints dispatched to my inbox by 9am on the first day would fill a pretty thick volume by themselves. But Julian Baggini's sights are set slightly higher than our new crossword layout.

Quoting Reinhold Niebuhr's prayer “God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference”, the moral philosopher sets out to defend the oncenoble art of complaining.

He puts complaining right up there with the basic human traits of eating, working and copulating; it is, he says, a positive, constructive force that has lain at the root of all social change, and can do so again, if we could only reclaim it from the mire of compensation culture and petty whingeing into which it has sunk.

He charts the decline of complaining from the principled calling that once produced seismic shifts in social justice - votes for women, the abolition of slavery, the ending of apartheid - using recent headlines, from Jamie Oliver's school dinners campaign to Bush and Blair on Iraq.

Baggini does lecture us on the obvious. “Having a good moan can be extremely cathartic” doesn't require a further two pages explaining why; ditto his clear example of a mistaken complaint, when tourists arrive at Machu Picchu to marvel at it, only to complain about how much better it would be if the crowds weren't so big.

However, his chapter on “Wrong complaints” made me sit up again with the words: “When you write for newspapers and magazines, you get used to people complaining about things you simply have not said.” Too true, mate.

And his cure should be in the small print every day in The Times: “Just check whether what you are complaining about is actually the case. If everyone followed this simple injunction, I predict that the background noise of pointless complaint would almost disappear, and we would then either focus on the complaints that really count, enjoy life a bit more, or perhaps a bit of both.”

Still, he has the good grace to identify this failing in himself, concluding that part of the ritual of reading a paper is to moan about it.

He talks great sense on the positive effects of our modern grievance culture, and has a good line in aphorisms: “A man who is tired of complaining is tired of life”; “The meek would have no world to inherit if the more petulant did not set about building one fit to last.”

A shame, then, that an otherwise enjoyable read should be marred by silly slips: the stand-up comic Chris Tucker confusingly becomes Turner over the page, and later Baggini writes: “All this suggests that nurture may often be more important than nurture in fashioning our patterns of complaint...” I feel a complaint to the publisher coming on.

Complaint: From Minor Moans to Principled Protests by Julian Baggini
Profile, £12.99 Buy the book here

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