Chris Jone's feature in the recent Esquire, 'The Things that Carried Him Home" is going to pick up more than a few awards - and anyone who wants to be a features writer, or tells themselves they are a features writer, should read this and discover just how high the bar can go. Great writing, astonishing reporting - and, it must be said, what looks like a pretty supportive American magazine expenses regime (almost extinct in the UK) - combining to blow you away. I can't believe that a piece of work as valuable as this is available free online...

Just tearing through Mark Kurlansky's "Non-Violence: The History of a Dangerous Idea", which appeared in 2006 to widespread critical silence. It's a fantastic book, an entertaining and methodical polemic against our commonplaces about the unavoilability of violence in human conflict.

But even accounting for the fact that it was slightly off his usual marketplace - his big hits have been food-based history books, on Cod, Oysters and Salt - this book was very quietly received. Was this because it felt a bit do-goody? Or simply because, oddly, it was so darn short? I'm guesing 60,000 words tops, less than a James Bond novel - and subsequently feeling flimsy to the literary eye, perhaps? There is a paradox in here - getting readers to FINISH a book, particulalry argumentative non-fiction, is a real challenge (so often, I just read the introduction, agree with its claims, and set the book aside) but lengthiness is seen as a sign of gravitas, scholarship and scope. So our shelves buckle beneath works we've 'sort-of read', enough to comprehend and concur with.

With pamphleteering essentially dead, it would be nice to think 40-60,000-word non-fiction books would have a real place today. So many of my favourite works of fiction are tiny - Heart of Darkness, The Fall, The Outsider, Slaughterhouse 5, The Code of the Woosters (!) - a tightly-argued slither of non-fiction could surely be just as impactful. Kurlansky's certainly is - all the more impactful, in fact, for being so easy to finish and to recommend. But in the brutal economics of the bookshop, is a £13 hardback, for just over 180 small pages plus notes really going to attract many buyers? Perhaps the short non-fiction book is simply defeated by economies of scale...

Anyway, I heartily commend the book, now in paperback, to you...