Anyone who has watched Derren Brown’s shows will definitely want to pick up this volume, in which he discusses how some of his tricks are done (but not all, alas), expounding at length on memory tricks, hypnosis and how neurolinguistic programming (NLP, but to me this stands for natural language processing) isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. By far his longest riff condemns the easy acceptance of pseudoscience – beliefs in psychics or alternative medicine for instance – and the equal tendency to dismiss science as biased.

I appreciate Derren Brown’s honesty about his work – that it’s based on psychology and some trickery and showmanship and there’s nothing supernatural to him (though some people insist there is!). I am of the same mind regarding science and pseudoscience so I was okay with that, I imagine several people (the sort he condemns) would hate it though. The best parts were of course where he discusses things like how ouija boards work, how to perform hypnosis, how to “be” “psychic” (cold and hot reading). Too bad there wasn’t a lot more on his tricks, but I guess that would be giving the whole game away.

Highly recommended overall, if you can take his brand of humour (I didn’t mind being called a “clever sausage” several times, but someone else might).