The Challenge of Things: Thinking Through Troubled Times - Softcover

Grayling is particularly good at illuminating the knottiness of moral discourse (Sunday Times)

Grayling writes with clarity, elegance and the occasional aphoristic twist, conscious of standing in that long essayistic tradition that runs from Montaigne and Bacon to Emerson and Thoreau (Daily Telegraph)

If there is any such person in Britain as The Thinking Man, it is A. C. Grayling (The Times)

The range of topics he covers is impressively broad, taking in subjects as diverse as the ethics of drone warfare, the nature of the mind and the meaning of happiness . "Informed and considered" also nicely describes his urbane and eminently reasonable intellectual style . At his best, Grayling is a tough-minded proponent of the kind of enlightened rationalism expounded by several of the public intellectuals with whom he declares an affinity here: Bertrand Russell, Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens, to name only three. But he's more historically-minded than Russell, less dogmatic than Dawkins and less in thrall to the charms of his own fluency than Hitchens (Prospect)