With his trademark eloquence and humour, Robert Dessaix, one of Australia's eminent writers, tackles humbug in the modern world—the tide of mumbo jumbo where words fall short of what they mean and motivations are not always what they appear.

MUP’s new series Little Books on Big Themes pairs leading Australian thinkers and cultural figures with some of the big themes in life. Each author’s 10,000-word take on a chosen theme is presented as an eminently collectable hardback.

Robert Dessaix is a writer, interviewer, translator and broadcaster. His best-known books, published around the world, are the autobiography A Mother's Disgrace, the novels Night Letters and Corfu, a collection of essays and short stories (and so forth) and the travel memoir Twilight of Love. He has also published translations of works by Chekhov, Dostoyevsky and Turgenev.