Paperbacks: The Gatekeeper <br></br>A Pelican in the Wilderness <br></br>Toothpicks and Logos <br></br>Jesus <br></br>Madness: a brief history

The Gatekeeper, by Terry Eagleton (Penguin, £6.99, 178pp)

Admirably slender and unpretentious, this is also one of the funniest memoirs of recent years, on a par with George Melly's Owning Up. How unexpected, then, that it is written by the professor of cultural theory at Manchester University, also a lifelong Marxist. The book could be accurately, if off-puttingly, described as a series of radical essays on an autobiographical theme. Actually, they would make a great Comedy Club act. The opening section, "Lifers", covers Eagleton's spooky experiences as the prepubescent gatekeeper at a closed nunnery (he once saw a nun with a ginger beard). The section on "Dons" covers his awkward time at Cambridge, where his tutor Dr Leo Greenway was "as warmly spontaneous as a shaving brush" and had "no more ideas in his head than a hamster". Wittgenstein once used him in a philosophical example: "If we were to take Greenway here and boil his head ...". The likes of John Sparrow ("disgusting old misogynist") and Dadie Rylands ("sex with this emotional desperado was said to be like being in a rugby scrum") appear as bit-players. We learn about sexual shenanigans in Eagleton's far-left faction: "Venereal diseases were circulating almost as fast as theories of neo-colonialism". So palatable is his radicalism that we scarcely notice his more dubious assertions. "Revolutionaries are neither optimists nor pessimists but realists," he insists. Still, anyone described by Prince Charles as "that dreadful Terry Eagleton" must have right on his side.

A Pelican in the Wilderness, by Isabel Colegate (HarperCollins, £8.99, 284pp)

Who would have dreamed that a book on hermits could be so engaging? The most celebrated columnist of all, St Simeon, is here of course. Did you know that his 60ft column was topped by a balustraded, 43sq ft living space, complete with toilet facilities? Colegate's trawl of recluses ranges from the mystic east (a Buddhist nun living in a cave at 13,500ft was the daughter of a London fishmonger) to the weird west (the radically unmanicured Howard Hughes). But how pleasing to meet Mrs Pobjoy, former mistress to Beau Nash, who lived in a hollow tree and "raised her voice in cheerful but discordant song".

Toothpicks and Logos, by John Heskett (Oxford, £8.99, 214pp)

The best book I have read about the design process," declares Terence Conran on the cover and, at first, you're inclined to agree. An English professor of design in Chicago, Heskett notes how the subject has been "widely transformed into something banal and inconsequential". A hard-hitting polemic might be expected, but apart from a swipe at Philippe Starck's rocket-shaped lemon squeezer ("signally deficient"), this book is a disappointingly bland tour d'horizon of modern design. When Haskett commends the interiors of MacFisheries, you wonder when he was last here.

Jesus, by A N Wilson, Pimlico, £12.50, 297pp

Reissued in a handsome edition, this book "caused a sensation" in 1992. Wilson's close reading of the Gospels, informed by recent scholarship, prompted him to shed his belief in the divinity of Jesus, which, he maintains, was invented by St Paul. Despite the persuasively precise detail in the New Testament – it seems that the Greek word used for fish in the feeding of the 5,000 actually meant cooked fish, "a bit like kipper or bloater" – Wilson insists that "its way of viewing the universe is entirely unlike our own". Brilliantly written, his lucid analysis will engage believers and agnostics alike.

Madness: a brief history, by Roy Porter (Oxford, £7.99, 241pp)

In Porter's last, astonishingly rich book, he displays characteristic energy in tracing madness from the viewpoints of philosophers, doctors and patients. Melancholia was regarded as "a severe mental disturbance" in Classical times, though savoured by Shakespeare and Keats. Similarly, the views of those treating the mad have violently oscillated. The craze for institutionalisation peaked in the Fifties (500,000 in the US, 150,000 in the UK). As Restoration playwright Nathaniel Lee remarked about his committal to Bedlam: "They called me mad, and I called them mad, and damn them, they outvoted me."