Thursday 7 March at 7.00 p.m.

In The Silence of Animals: On Progress and Other Modern Myths (Allen Lane) political philosopher John Gray continues the powerful critique of liberal humanism that has been at the heart of his work for the last three decades, most notably in his 2002 work Straw Dogs to which The Silence of Animals is a sort of sequel. Gray examines human life in extremis, drawing on the works of Borges, J.G. Ballard and Joseph Conrad, to analyse the stories that we tell about ourselves in order to survive. ‘John Gray is one of the most consistently interesting and unpredictable thinkers in Britain’ wrote Jason Cowley in the Observer. ‘He is unpredictable because, unlike most political commentators, he never ceases to question the underlying assumptions of his own beliefs and prejudices.’ He will be at the shop to talk about his latest book, in conversation with the essayist and novelist Pankaj Mishra.