Steve Jobs, by Walter Isaacson. Little, Brown, £14.99

Interview-enhanced, lavishly documented, this epic, if slightly indigestible, life of Apple’s founding genius could have done with more of the human-friendly interface that let his smart machines trounce their more robotic rivals.

Most diligently, Isaacson answers every FAQ – and a thousand others – about Jobs’s ascent from the Homebrew Computer Club of counter-cultural California to the tablet era. How piquant that the hang-loose ethic of those days bred the fanatical “quest for perfection” of an inspiring control-freak.