20% of the UK population will suffer from depression – double 30 years ago

Dr Steve Ilardi is slim and enthusiastic, with intense eyes. The clinical psychologist is 4,400 miles away, in Kansas, and we are chatting about his new book via Skype, the online videophone service. “I’ve spent a lot of time pondering Skype,” he says. “On the one hand it provides a degree of social connectedness. On the other, you’re still essentially by yourself.” But, he concludes, “a large part of the human cortex is devoted to the processing of visual information, so I guess Skype is less alienating than voice calls.”

Social connectedness is important to Ilardi. In The Depression Cure, he argues that the brain mistakenly interprets the pain of depression as an infection. Thinking that isolation is needed, it sends messages to the sufferer to “crawl into a hole and wait for it all to go away”. This can be disastrous because what depressed people really need is the opposite: more human contact.

Which is why social connectedness forms one-sixth of his “lifestyle based” cure for depression. The other five elements are meaningful activity (to prevent “ruminating” on negative thoughts); regular exercise; a diet rich in omega-3 fatty acids; daily exposure to sunlight; and good quality, restorative sleep.

The programme has one glaring omission: anti-depressant medication. Because according to Ilardi, the drugs simply don’t work. “Meds have only around a 50% success rate,” he says. “Moreover, of the people who do improve, half experience a relapse. This lowers the recovery rate to only 25%. To make matters worse, the side effects often include emotional numbing, sexual dysfunction and weight gain.”

As a respected clinical psychologist and university professor, Ilardi’s views are hard to dismiss. A research team at his workplace, the University of Kansas, has been testing his system – known as TLC (Therapeutic Lifestyle Change) – in clinical trials. The preliminary results show, he says, that every patient who put the full programme into practice got better.

Ilardi is convinced that the medical profession’s readiness to prescribe anti-depression medication is obscuring an important debate. Up to 20% of the UK population will have clinical depression at some point, he says – twice as many as 30 years ago. Where has this depression epidemic come from?

The answer, he suggests, lies in our lifestyle. “Our standard of living is better now than ever before, but technological progress comes with a dark underbelly. Human beings were not designed for this poorly nourished, sedentary, indoor, sleep-deprived, socially isolated, frenzied pace of life. So depression continues its relentless march.”

Our environment may have evolved rapidly but our physical evolution hasn’t kept up. “Our genome hasn’t moved on since 12,000 years ago, when everyone on the planet were hunter- gatherers,” he says. “Biologically, we still have Stone Age bodies. And when Stone Age body meets modern environment, the health consequences can be disastrous.”

To counteract this Ilardi focuses on the aspects of a primitive lifestyle that militate against depression. “Hunter- gatherer tribes still exist today in some parts of the world,” he says, “and their level of depression is almost zero. The reasons? They’re too busy to sit around brooding. They get lots of physical activity and sunlight. Their diet is rich in omega-3, their level of social connection is extraordinary, and they regularly have as much as 10 hours of sleep.” Ten hours? “We need eight. At the moment we average 6.7.”

So we should all burn our possessions and head out into the forest? “Of course not,” Iladi shudders. “That would be like a lifelong camping trip with 30 close relatives for company. Nobody would recommend that.”

Instead we can adapt our modern lifestyle to match our genome by harnessing modern technology, such as fish oil supplements to increase our intake of omega-3. All well and good. But I can’t escape the feeling that the six-step programme seems like common sense. Isn’t it obvious that more sleep, exercise and social connectedness are good for you?

“The devil is in the detail,” replies Ilardi. “People need to know how much sunlight is most effective, and at which time of day. And taking supplements, for example, is a complex business. You need anti-oxidants to ensure that the fish oil is effective, as well as a multivitamin. Without someone spelling it out, most people would never do it.”

“Everyone can benefit from the six-step programme, not just the clinically depressed,” Ilardi continues. “People who are too depressed to get motivated, or those who are very disadvantaged, might need someone to coach them through it. And before coming off medication, you should consult a doctor. But ultimately, the depression cure can work for everyone.”

Ilardi practises the programme himself. He’s never been depressed, he tells me, but it increases his sense of wellbeing and reduces his absentmindedness (his college nickname was “Spaced”).

It all makes sense, but will I try it myself? I don’t suffer from depression, but wellbeing sounds nice. I’m not so sure about the fish oil, but I might just give it a go.

Enjoy the sunshine, get plenty of sleep – and be sociable

Diet: The brain is 60% fat. Deficiencies in Omega 3 fatty acids can leave the brain prone to depression. Take 1500mg of Omega 3 daily (1000mg of EPA and 500mg of DHA) in the form of fish oil capsules, together with a multivitamin and a 500mg Vitamin C supplement. These last two are antioxidants. They protect the fish oil from becoming spoiled by the oxygen in your system.

Meaningful activity: Create a list of engaging activities. Use it when you notice yourself “ruminating,” or dwelling on negative thoughts. Even conversation counts.

Exercise: Aim for 90 minutes per week, ideally in three 30 minute sessions. Choose activities that are enjoyable and have a clear purpose, such as walking to a destination or playing sport. No exercise bikes or treadmills.

Sunlight: Natural light stimulates the brain’s production of serotonin, which reduces depression. Fifteen to thirty minutes of sunlight each morning is enough in the summer. In the winter, consider using a lightbox.

Social connection: The brain treats depression like an infection and mistakenly tells us to isolate ourselves. Counteract this by making a conscious effort to be sociable. Be open about your depression, but don’t let it dominate the conversation.

Restorative sleep: 8 hours of sleep is ideal. Use your bed only for sleeping, and sleep at regular times. Avoid bright light, caffeine and alcohol at night. Stay away from napping and turn down your thermostat at bedtime. Think relaxing thoughts in bed, and don’t try to fall asleep!

NB: The sections in italics were cut, or edited down, when this piece appeared in the Guardian. Read the Guardian version here.

Marcus du Sautoy: a national treasure?

Question: what’s a million times five? No, it’s not a trick. The answer is the amount of dollars you could win if you solved all five mathematical conundrums in The Num8er My5teries, a new book by the iconic popular mathematician Marcus du Sautoy. The book is based on a competition set up in 2000 by an American businessman called Landon Clay. Five puzzles, $1 million each.

It could be you.

Or at least that was true until last March, when the reclusive Russian maths genius Grigoriy Perelman solved one of the conundrums — known as the “Poincaré conjecture” — in resounding fashion. “Last week there was a glitzy award ceremony to present the first million dollars to Perelman,” du Sautoy tells me, his voice brimming with customary enthusiasm. “But he didn’t turn up.”

Didn’t turn up? “Mathematicians are rather quirky. We don’t tend to be interested in money,” du Sautoy says. “It’s the glory of eternity that motivates us.” In the eyes of du Sautoy and his colleagues, the Russian has achieved something that has no earthly price. “Personally,” he says candidly, “I’d pay a million dollars to solve one of these problems. It’s a small price to pay to become immortal.”

In The Num8er My5teries, these problems are presented with the flair and vim that has made du Sautoy into something of a national treasure. “I build up to each conundrum with some unexpected questions,” he tells me. “Why did Beckham choose the 23 shirt? Why do cicadas love the number 17? And how can you win the lottery?” (This final question, I suspect, may appeal to gold diggers who see the book as an investment.) “What’s more,” the mathematician continues, “I’ve made the problems into games like Minesweeper and Su Doku. It’s wide open for everyone.”

I am almost inclined to have a crack myself. But then I recall that my last experience with mathematics was at GCSE, 16 years ago (I got a C). If so many extraordinary mathematical brains have tried and failed, what chance could I possibly have?

“Every chance,” du Sautoy says. And I think he means it. “Non-mathematicians sometimes approach things from a whole new angle. The next winner might well be a reader of my book, who became inspired while sitting on the loo.” He notices my sudden amplification of interest. “Though of course,” he reminds me, “if you’re doing it for the money, you’ll never be a real mathematician.”

"Sha'anan Streett: peacenik hip hop?"

Sha’anan Streett, the frontman of Hadag Nahash – the biggest hip-hop band in Israel – is hung over. And the waitress in the Jerusalem cafe clearly knows it. “Black coffee followed by a big green salad?” she suggests. He gives her a wry smile. “You know me too well,” he replies.

Then he turns to me, sotto voce. “Last night,” he murmurs, “too many substances.” He motions to his “f*** the police” T-shirt. “This is my own design,” he tells me.

It is all very hip-hop. But there is more to Sha’anan Streett than meets the eye. For one thing, he is a devoted family man, in a stable marriage with three small children. For another, he still lives in Jerusalem; all the other members of the band moved to the bright lights of Tel Aviv. And most strikingly of all, he is the brains behind the One Shekel Festival – so called because it only costs a shekel to attend – which takes place every year in the most disadvantaged areas of Israel.

From the very beginning, Streett has been a politically motivated musician. His first song, which he wrote after completing his army service, was a droll, laid-back acid-jazz tune called Shalom Salaam Peace.

“I couldn’t play anything but the recorder,” he says, “but I could rap. And I felt very strongly about politics. I made 300 copies of Shalom Salaam Peace, and went round selling it in CD shops.”

One of the shop assistants was a musician, and they agreed to start a band. Hadag Nahash – which means “eel” in Hebrew, and puns on nahag hadash, or “new driver” – was born.

“It was amazing,” recalls Streett, “Shalom Salaam Peace went straight to number one. It was like a dream come true.”

Evidently there was an audience for peacenik hip hop. With lyrics like “a land that has peace is a land of fun/ and a land without peace is a land of foul mess,” there could be no mistaking Streett’s political orientation.

The musician’s ideological stance was sharpened around 10 years ago by way of a much-publicised vendetta with the right-wing rapper Subliminal. Streett, munching his big green salad, has little time for his old rival. “Subliminal is a businessman, not a musician,” he says. “He made big Zionist statements, but he was only aiming for sales.”

His view is apparently confirmed by Subliminal’s latest career move. His most recent song, At Me, a duet with Dana International (the Israeli transsexual winner of the 1998 Eurovision song contest), features the lyric “sexy, sexy, sexy, sexy boy”.

Streett is not surprised. “It’s only to be expected,” he says, “Subliminal has seen another business opportunity. He’s dropped his politics because it no longer suits him.”

Hadag Nahash, meanwhile, have made no compromises. Their latest album, released this year, features songs in Hebrew and Arabic, and includes tracks like One More Brother, a protest against violence in Israeli society.

“We’re saying it louder and clearer than ever,” says Streett. “We haven’t changed our opinions and we haven’t changed our music.”

This is reflected in Streett’s passion for the One Shekel Festival. Back in 2000, when Hadag Nahash were riding the first wave of fame, his immediate instinct was to help the poorer communities in Israel.

“That summer we played at the music festivals,” Streett recalls, “to audiences that were 10 times the size of what we were used to. I got off stage really fired up. In the toilet I saw two kids who were panicking. The festival was in Ashkelon, on the beach, and they couldn’t afford to get in – so they had swum around the barrier, and were terrified of getting caught.”

Then and there, Streett decided to do something. “I entered the bathroom Superman, and came out Clark Kent,” he tells me. “I realised that unlike myself, many people in the country didn’t have the money to go to gigs. That’s how the idea of the One Shekel Festival started.”

Since then, it has gone from strength to strength, attracting thousands of people from disadvantaged areas each year. Moreover, Streett has used the events to foster Jewish-Arab relations.

“It’s great to have Jewish and Arab bands performing together,” he says, “but it’s not always easy. Last year an Arab band made inflammatory comments about martyrs in Gaza. The festival was almost closed down. But when you see Muslim girls in headscarves wearing a One Shekel Festival T-shirt, with our slogan, ‘culture is a basic right’, it makes it all worth it.”

The rapper finishes his big green salad and sits back, squinting through rheumy, hangover eyes.

“I believe in three things: art, culture and love,” he says. “The festivals won’t change the world, and they won’t change politics. But on a small scale, they make a difference.”

"Devise a strategy for dealing with trouble ahead."

Hello, Jake, how are you?”

“OK.”

“How was your day at school?”

“OK.”

“Have you got much homework?”

“Yup.”

“What is it?”

“Oh, stuff.”

“Darling, is everything OK? You’re very quiet.”

“Yup.”

“Can you at least look at me when I’m talking to you? I’m asking if you’re OK.”

“I just told you, I’m fine. Stop going on at me.”

“I don’t think checking you’re OK is going on at you. I am your mother, you know.”

“OK, OK, I’m fine, everything’s OK, please can you give me some peace?”

“How dare you . . .”

Before you ask, this is not a memoir from my adolescence. It is an extract from Divas & Door Slammers: the secrets to having a better behaved teenager, a new book by the behavioural expert and inner-city headmaster Charlie Taylor. This dialogue is part of a case study, illustrating how easy it is for parents to alienate their teenagers.

“Teenagers have an inbuilt capacity to annoy their parents,” says the author when we meet at a café in Notting Hill, West London. “The sight of a pair of low-slung trousers, or a great spotty oaf slouched across the sofa, is enough to make any parent’s blood boil.” But, according to Taylor, teenagers can’t always help it. “Their brains are developing at a tremendous rate,” he says. “There is a huge amount of activity flaring in different directions. Neurones are sparking all over the place, making them go haywire.”

This means that if a cycle of bad behaviour is to end, it must be the parents who end it. “Your teenager is not going to change unless you change,” says Taylor. “If you do what you have always done, you will get what you always get.”

So what, in Jake’s case, should his mother have done differently? “Jake was sulky because he knew that his mother’s greeting had strings attached,” says Taylor. “Her real agenda was to hassle him about his homework. She should have waited until they had at least one reasonable conversation in the bank.”

Taylor is one of a dying breed of eccentric British headmasters, with crystalline manners, a posh voice and the air of a dishevelled diplomat. He has faded Biro on the back of one hand and looks perpetually tired. Yet, at the same time, he is brimming with joie de vivre.

He grew up in Notting Hill, in a family with a rich tradition of pedagogy (his “famously fierce” grandmother was the head of a prep school in Eastbourne). He went to Eton, then undertook a four-year teaching degree before starting work at a comprehensive. Before long he developed a fascination — and affinity — with badly behaved children. He has worked with them ever since.

“I used to be badly behaved myself,” he tells me, a flicker of old mischief in his eye. “Once, my friends and I tied up a teacher with a skipping rope. We were sent home and my mother was very cross. But all I could say was: ‘But Mum, it was brilliant!’” He pauses for a moment. “Maybe you shouldn’t put that in,” he says. Another pause. “Oh, what the hell. It was a long time ago.”

Taylor’s school in West London aims to get children with behavioural, emotional and social difficulties back into mainstream education. Since he took over the place has been transformed, and it is now the darling of Ofsted inspectors. “Don’t get me wrong — the job is dangerous,” he admits. “Many of my staff have been put in hospital by pupils.” He winces. “But we have a very high success rate. It’s incredibly rewarding.”

A key part of Taylor’s approach is the “positive touch policy”. “Being restrained is very similar to being hugged,” he says. “When I first arrived, I saw children attacking teachers just to get restrained, because they received no physical affection at home. So I told all the teachers that hugging was part of their job. They worried that it was illegal but emphatically it is not. It made a massive difference.”

His pupils also give each other ten minutes of massage every day. “There was a lot of resistance to the idea at first,” says Taylor, “but it’s so moving to see a scary hoody tenderly massaging another pupil. A lot of teenagers would behave much better if they received positive touch from their parents.”

So what led Taylor to write this book? “I realised that being a teenager in 2010 is much more complicated than it was in the past,” he says. “Mobile phones and social networking mean that children can have access to the entire globe in the secrecy of their bedroom. Marriage breakdowns are increasing and teenagers are bombarded constantly with images of sex and glamour. In addition, schools have been set very narrow curriculum targets. This means that teachers do anything to meet those targets, at the expense of everything else.”

All this, according to Taylor, has a detrimental effect on teenage behaviour. “Some parents are terrified of their children,” he says, “because they don’t know how to control them.”

In his book, he describes a father who “immediately gets butterflies in his stomach” when presented with a photograph of his 14-year-old son, and a mother whose pulse leaps from 80 to 100 just by “imagining her son for a few minutes”.

Taylor, who had already written a book about getting toddlers to behave, felt compelled to act. “Parents need these skills,” he says. “Deep down, teenagers want to be disciplined. They are not really happy running wild. That’s why I wrote this book.”

The central premise of Divas & Door Slammers is that teenagers should be treated more as children than as adults. Like a boy whose voice is breaking — Taylor’s metaphor, not mine — the teenager may sometimes seem very grown up but at other times will lapse into a childish squeak.

“Teenagers are trying to distance themselves from their parents and establish their identity,” he says, “but despite their ‘cool’ exterior they are children at heart. They still need their parents to be there for them, to give them cuddles and support.”

One of the best ways to improve a teenager’s behaviour is to use what Taylor calls a “6 to 1 strategy”. This means that every piece of criticism is balanced by six pieces of praise.

“When a toddler is potty training, parents instinctively pile on the praise. They try not to focus on the accidents, however unpleasant they may be,” says Taylor. “But as the child grows up, the praise tails off and parents can become quite critical. So, when dealing with your teenager, think of potty training.”

But that is only one side of the story. “You also need to have very clear boundaries,” says Taylor, “and enforce them with rewards and punishments. The best incentive is money. Teenagers are interested in little else.”

Isn’t that rather like paying children to be good? “That’s not the idea,” says Taylor. “You must target only one specific piece of bad behaviour at a time, and have a time limit — say, a month — after which you end the deal. If a child is living in a permanent system of incentives and deterrents, that can be very damaging.”

Parents must also take special care not to get into what Taylor calls “reptile mode” — a state of stress that prevents people from thinking straight. “Biologically speaking,” he explains, “stress diverts blood away from the rational brain and towards the areas responsible for ‘fight or flight’. You start making exaggerated accusations or wild threats. At that point, confrontation is inevitable.”

But how do you avoid it? “The key is to plan your strategies in advance,” says Taylor. In his book, he compares confronting a teenager to going into battle. “If you have a clear idea of your objectives and strategies for dealing with behavioural hotspots,” he says, “that will stop you seeing red and help to keep your reptile mode at bay. Eventually, like a well-trained soldier, it will become second nature.”

This sounds all well and good. But here is the litmus test: what about his children?

“Impeccably behaved,” he chuckles. “Obviously.” I look doubtful. “Seriously,” he says, “they are naughty but just the right amount. That’s what I mean by impeccable. It is the repetitive patterns of bad behaviour that you have to worry about. If they were all little angels I’d be very concerned indeed.”

As we make our way out of the café, Taylor is collared by a frazzled-looking woman on the next table. She has overheard our conversation and wants the name of his book so that she can buy it. “Poor woman,” says Taylor, after writing down the details for her. “I hope my book solves her problems.”

Oliver James: "powered by a nuclear rage"

On my way out of the bathroom of a café in South Kensington, I collide with an unusual-looking man. There is something of the artist about him. He is wearing a flamboyant silk scarf and a capacious greatcoat, and peers through his spectacles like a character from a wartime spy novel. We make our apologies and I find my way to the corner of the café to wait for Oliver James, the esteemed clinical psychologist and broadcaster, author of such iconic books as They F*** You Up, Britain on the Couch and Affluenza. After a couple of minutes, I realise I have just met him.

James removes his flamboyant scarf and coat and sits down opposite me, taking a nicotine tablet. “I’ve just had the photoshoot,” he says, “I wonder if they’ve made me look horrible.” I make reassuring noises to the effect that they’ve not. “Do you have children yourself?” he asks. I tell him I have three: a two-year-old and nine-month-old twins. He looks at me in surprise. “Fuck,” exclaims the clinical psychologist.

James’ new book, How Not to F*** Them Up – the follow-on to his cult classic They F*** You Up – is a psychological guide to parenting. Unlike other books of this sort, How Not to F*** Them Up focuses on the wellbeing of the parent as a starting point for meeting the needs of the child. In reality, James argues, the happiness of the parent is “what will ultimately decide whether your child has a fruitful, sane life”. And sorting out your own wellbeing is not always easy. As he puts it, “The real challenge of parenthood is you, not your child.”

The centrepiece of the book is a method for identifying the type of parent you are, and thus what your needs may be. “Solid scientific research,” writes James in the introduction, “reveals that mothers of small children tend to fall into three groups, in terms of their approach to mothering and the basic feeling they have about under-threes.” These groups are: Organisers, Huggers, and Fleximums (“Flexis”). As one might imagine, each group has its own qualities, challenges and requirements. The idea is that understanding which group you fall into can allow you to ensure not only that your children get what they need, but that you get what you need, too.

Before I have a chance to open the interview, James asks how I’ve been coping with my three young children. It is immediately evident that he is a sensitive listener, showing no sign of judgement or impatience. For a few minutes, I almost forget who is interviewing whom. I find myself revealing that my other half, Isobel, breastfed all of our children exclusively ‘ until they were six months old. I explain that we’ve never put our children into a routine or sent them to nurseries. Rather, Isobel looks after them at home and finds it hugely rewarding. Moreover, I work from home myself and take on as much of the childcare as possible. When my first child was born, I took six weeks of paternity leave. It didn’t feel like nearly enough.

“You’re Huggers,” says James conclusively, picking up a lettuce leaf with his fingers, “no doubt about it. A pretty classic case. Around 25 per cent of the UK population are Huggers, so you’re not alone.” So what is a Hugger? And how does it help me to know I can count myself among them?

According to How Not to F*** Them Up, the defining principle of the Hugger is to “place the needs of the baby ahead of everything”. The baby may sleep in the Huggers’ bed, be fed on demand, and made into the centre of their world. The Hugger mother “luxuriates in motherhood, happy to put her life on hold for at least three years. She adores being with her under-threes.” The idea of placing the kid in a nursery and going back to work is – to the Hugger – completely anathema.

“Hugger mothers give their children a wonderful start in life,” says James, gesturing with his bunched-up lettuce leaf. “Under-threes need constant, sensitive, one-to-one care, and Huggers certainly provide that. However, I was serious when I wrote in the book that Hugging can sometimes be unhealthy. Some Huggers have major problems with letting go of their baby and allowing it to become an independent toddler. I’ve known Huggers who won’t leave their one-year-old to be fed by a grandparent, worried they might choke. Those Huggers would certainly benefit from therapy.”

One of the most useful features of How Not to F*** Them Up are the Practical Top Tips, provided separately for each of the three parenting archetypes. Top tips for Huggers include advice on housekeeping (the classic Hugger is a messy bugger), disciplining toddlers (Huggers may find it difficult to “create clear rules and limits”), and – most importantly – “dealing with other mothers who disapprove”.

“When I was writing the book, my aim was to help parents accept themselves and their parenting style,” explains James. “The evidence shows that most mothers are liable to feel that wider society disapproves of their approach. And, in some ways, they’re right. Organisers tend to find the ways of the Hugger horrifying, and vice versa. I hope that through reading this book, parents will become more comfortable in their own skin, more confident to do what’s right for them, and less critical of the way that other parents do things.”

But James’ diagnosis of my parenting style is not 100 per cent accurate. For one thing, so far neither Isobel nor I have had difficulties with allowing our children independence. For another, we’ve never been keen on bed-sharing. And our house isn’t any messier than the next man’s, give or take a nappy or three. Furthermore, Isobel has been sporadically running her own business in parallel with caring for the children. None of these are characteristics of the Hugger. Isn’t James reducing complexity and nuance into easy-to-swallow chunks?

“You’re right,” says the psychologist, still gesturing with the lettuce. “Very few people fall squarely into one category or another. These are guidelines, not laws. You might be basically a Hugger, but with Organiser tendencies. And it is wholly possible to switch from one group to another with different children, or even, later on, with the same child.”

Notwithstanding my non-Hugger tendencies, I have to admit that when I read the section on Organisers, I had the classic Hugger reaction: I was appalled. “That’s pretty predictable,” says James. “Organisers exist on an entirely different wavelength, and Huggers just don’t understand where they’re coming from. Like I said: you’re a Hugger.” He smiles wryly and – at last – eats his lettuce leaf.

The Organiser is, in many ways, the Hugger’s nemesis. The Organiser believes the baby should fit around the parents, not the other way round. Retaining the sort of adult lifestyle that was enjoyed prior to the birth is of vital importance to the Organiser mother: her greatest fear, deep down, is of “falling in love with the baby” and, as a result, letting her sophisticated lifestyle slide. The Organiser has a long-term view of her family, understanding that getting her figure back and earning regular money are vital if the family unit is going to be a stable one. She is a creature of routine, returning to work sooner rather than later, and delegating the task of looking after the baby. “Unlike the Hugger,” writes James, “spending hours on end with the baby in your arms is not [the Organiser's] idea of heaven. Nor is breastfeeding.” Not surprisingly, the Organiser would be horrified at the notion of bed- sharing, and intolerant of a chaotic house. From her point of view, the Hugger mother who wishes to look after the baby all day for years on end, rather than work, is “slacking”.

“Many Organisers find it difficult to relate to the needs of an infant,” James explains. “Often, an Organiser mother and her baby are like two walkie-talkies tuned to different channels. As a result, Organisers find looking after small children boring or unfulfilling. But this doesn’t mean they love the baby any less, nor that they are unhealthy. It’s worth remembering that 25 per cent of the population are Organisers – the same proportion as Huggers. It’s just what some people are like.”

According to James, it is perfectly possible for Organisers to meet the needs of their under-threes through the judicious use of delegation. But they need to pay close attention to the sort of substitute care they choose. “The wrong kind of early care,” he says, “a daycare nursery, for example, or an inadequate child minder, can be immensely damaging for a young child. On the other hand, a father or grandmother, or a competent nanny, can do an equally good job as a mother. Indeed, in China it is the norm for infants to be cared for by their grandmothers. In the book, I paid special attention to the research that has been done into the best and worst types of childcare. Hopefully, this information will help Organisers arrange a substitute in a way that will be best for the child.”

The third type of parent, the “Flexi” – who accounts for the remaining 50 per cent of the UK population – is a hybrid, and may call upon elements of both the Hugger and Organiser as the situation arises. This eminently practical breed sees no wisdom in basing their parenting on a restrictive central principle. They simply make the arrangements that best suit their circumstances, whether that involves going back to work and delegating childcare, or staying at home with the children. The Flexi, James writes, is “the supreme pragmatist. Above all, unlike the other kinds, she is less likely to be plagued by guilt or fear of getting it wrong, because she neither blames herself or the baby for how things go, she accepts things as they are.” Flexis have the ability to set up an Organiser-style routine, then switch into Hugger mode if the child falls sick. “Ducking and diving if partners let them down or jobs disappear, their lack of unrealistic idealism helps them cope in the face of severe adversity,” writes James. “They are down to earth and do not see themselves as victims and, on the whole, they enable their under-threes as well as themselves to more or less flourish.”

So could it be, I ask the psychologist, that in the Flexi we have the consummate Opti-mum? James acknowledges the pun with an impish smile. “Not at all,” he says, “there can be downsides to being a Flexi. Primarily, this takes the form of what I call mental gymnastics, in which a Flexi fools herself that she is balancing the needs of the whole family, when in reality, although her own needs are being met, the child is suffering. On other occasions, the Flexi may chop and change as a sort of evasion tactic, to avoid facing up to the difficult issues.”

James, it seems, is making a rather liberating point: any type of parent can be an Opti-mum. “The goal – sensitive, dedicated care for an under-three – is paramount and non-negotiable,” he says. “But you could provide that in a variety of ways, depending on the sort of parent you are.”

Although the theoretical content of How Not to F*** Them Up is complex, James has made his book easily readable by weaving the theory into a range of real-life case studies. My favourite is Pam, a 30-year-old Hugger from Manchester who looks like “a model or a footballer’s wife”. When her baby is born, however, she shuns her glamorous lifestyle and exchanges it for a life of babycare. Her partner is outraged and coerces her to visit a counsellor, thinking there must be something wrong with such unyielding devotion to a baby. Yet the counsellor provides some unexpected advice: he advises Pam to dump her partner! James uses Pam’s case to illustrate the difficulties involved when a Hugger and an Organiser clash.

“I wanted to make reading the book feel like chatting with friends at an NCT [National Childbirth Trust] group,” says James, “but with the addition of an analysis based on thoroughgoing evidence.” It is this evidence that sets How Not to F*** Them Up apart, and prevents it from lapsing into empty postulation. Every statement that James puts forward is rigorously supported by the facts, all of which are either included in an appendix or referenced. In addition, a section entitled “Mothering: The Evidence” analyses a host of statistics to provide a theoretical framework for best parenting practice.

“Since my aim was to help people feel confident in their parenting choices,” James explains, “I knew I needed to provide evidence to support what I was saying. Otherwise it would have come across as if I were laying down the law.”

Strangely enough, the book is lent an added sense of trustworthiness by the chequered persona of James himself. This is a man who wears his heart on his sleeve, and is not afraid to admit his own frailties. As a result, his theories come across not as condescension, but as advice from one fucked-up person to another. “Basically I was fucked up by my mother,” he explains. “She had four children under the age of five and found it difficult to cope. Often, I was left crying in my pram at the bottom of the garden.” According to the psychologist, this gave him an aggression problem. “By the time I arrived at Eton at the age of 13, I was quite feral. Not long after I arrived I assaulted a boy who mistakenly flicked me with a key ring. I was saved by my house master, who took me under his wing and helped me get into Cambridge. Although I went on to take far too much LSD, I gradually learnt to channel my inner rage in a more productive direction – that of my work.”

Indeed, at times, the book verges on confessional. At one point James reveals, “If I have achieved anything much in my professional life, at root it has been powered by a nuclear rage, that of the three-month-old screaming in his pram.” He doesn’t flinch when I bring this up. “I’m much better these days,” he says, “though I’m terminally addicted to nicotine.”

Reminded of his addiction, he takes the packet from his pocket and ingests another dose. The interview concluded, we bid each other goodbye and go our separate ways. In my bag nestles my proof copy of How Not to F*** Them Up: a book, I feel, that you can trust with your children.

‘How Not to F*** Them Up’ by Oliver James (Vermilion, £17.99) is out on Thursday

'Just having things ‘normalised’ can be a relief'

With some difficulty, I manoeuvre my extra-long double buggy — dubbed “the gondola” — into a room cluttered with plastic toys. The psychotherapist gets up from her beanbag to help me to fold it up. I introduce her to Isaac and Imogen, my seven-month-old twins, and then put them down on the mat. The babies, blissfully unaware of the therapist’s eyes, proceed to give the toys a good gumming.

I am at the Oxford Parent Infant Project (Oxpip), a charity that offers psychotherapy to parents and children under the age of 2 that was founded by the eminent child psychotherapist Sue Gerhardt, whose new book, The Selfish Society, comes out this month. In her first book, Why Love Matters, she argued that love was essential to brain development. It was a runaway success, selling more than 15,000 copies in its first year.

The Selfish Society, however, is more controversial. Drawing on a pick-and-mix of everything from politics to macroeconomics, Gerhardt mounts a furious attack on capitalism. She blames it for “eroding our social bonds”, creating an “impoverished emotional culture”, where “looking out for No 1” is the norm and parenting is undervalued.

This leads to her most inflammatory point: putting children in a nursery before their second birthday is profoundly damaging to their mental health. Our capitalist Government, she argues, is so keen to get mothers back to the business of wealth-generation that the cheap solution — nursery — is promoted, although it makes children vulnerable to “personality disorders” later in life.

At Oxpip, however, there is no sign of such contentious views. The therapist, Joanna Tucker, is careful not to condemn nurseries. “Mothers face a range of difficult choices,” she says. “We’re not here to pass judgment on their decisions.” But doesn’t she share Gerhardt’s anti-nursery ideals? There is a pause. “Tell me about any difficulties you have had with parenthood,” she suggests.

Having twins and a toddler, I tell her, although wonderfully fulfilling, has involved a level of stress that no man should have to deal with. When all three are crying, it’s impossible. Even if both parents are on duty, one child is still left over. At such times I panic and feel desperate to be out of earshot.

“That’s quite normal,” says Tucker. “Babies’ cries are biologically designed to make their parents feel uncomfortable.” I’m surprised at how reassured I feel. “You clearly have a strong bond with your twins,” she continues. “I can observe how you’re letting them play, but at the same time are attentive to each of their needs. A great deal of anxiety is produced when you worry that your experiences are not normal. Just having things ‘normalised’ can be a relief.”

But many of Oxpip’s clients require rather more than normalisation. “Some parents need a lot of help,” says the therapist. “Often, they unconsciously re-enact issues from their own past in their relationship with their children. we call this ‘ghosts in the nursery’. If a mother has suffered from childhood anorexia, for example, she might believe that her child is greedy. We try to free children from their parent’s ghosts by helping the parents to see what’s going on.”

One of Gerhardt’s main therapeutic techniques, used extensively by Oxpip, involves the use of video. “We film a parent-child interaction and play it back. Often the parent notices immediately where they’re going wrong,” says Tucker. “I once had a client who thought her older son was very difficult. When I filmed them, the video captured her giving the boy a most awful look, as if he was something really unpleasant. When the mother saw it, she was rather horrified. She also noticed that her son was constantly trying to get close to her, but she was ignoring him. Once she realised he loved her, she was able to love him back. We got a better cycle going.”

Projects like Oxpip can clearly make a profound difference to people who are struggling with parenthood. But why has Sue Gerhardt upped the ante so dramatically in The Selfish Society? I put the question to her at her cottage in north Oxford, over coffee that she has made on her Aga.

“Society has become selfish,” she says. “Greed and materialism have completely smothered empathy and moral living. If nothing is done about it, humanity won’t survive.” Decades of experience as a child psychotherapist, as well as the study of neuroscience, has led her to believe that most social problems can be traced back to the “inadequate” state of early childhood care in Britain, with its overt preference for nursery.

“The first two years of life are when the brain’s emotional systems are being set up,” she explains. “That’s when an area of the brain called the prefrontal cortex is developing, which enables us to be aware of both our own and others’ emotions. Sensitive and responsive parenting causes a chemical called dopamine to be released in the child’s brain, which enables the child’s emotional awareness to develop.”

In a nursery, Gerhardt argues, this developmental process can be stunted. “In the 1940s,” she says, “there was a study of toddlers isolated from their parents in a tuberculosis hospital. They went through stages of adapting to their emotional deprivation — first protesting and looking for their mother, then growing despairing and listless, and finally becoming emotionally detached. In a nursery, a similar process can occur. In neurological terms, the development of the frontal cortex is being hampered, and this creates an emotional black hole. When the child grows up, he or she is likely to crave emotional substitutes — consumerism, money, or drugs. It is fertile ground for personality disorders.”

Although my own children are being looked after at home, I know many mothers who don’t want to — or can’t — leave the world of work. I can only imagine the amount of guilt they would experience on reading The Selfish Society. Isn’t Gerhardt forgetting that other factors are involved, such as the need to make money or sustain a career? “I’m not suggesting it’s all the parents’ fault,” Gerhardt explains. “The Government needs to stop promoting nurseries so aggressively. We need to introduce a two-year state-funded parenting wage, set at the level of the average income, to be claimed by either parent, or shared between them. And we need to reform employment legislation so that employers are forced to keep a mother’s job open, and to offer flexible working hours.”

All this would be expensive. But Gerhardt tells me that recent studies by the New Economics Foundation prove that greater investment in early childhood care makes economic sense. “Every pound invested early on would save £7 of social costs within ten years,” she explains. “We could slash our spending on prisons, depression-related NHS costs, social services and so on.”

Gerhardt’s theories certainly seem to be borne out by research. But I wonder if it can really be true that so much of our personalities are created by our early years? Statements such as “people who are well nurtured might be less interested in keeping up with fashion” seem oversimplified.

Oliver James, the clinical psychologist and author, broadly supports Gerhardt’s understanding of childhood development. “Care in the first year is indeed linked to a likelihood of personality disorders,” he says. “When a parent figure is unloving or frequently absent, a child does not learn to form healthy relationships. This causes a weak sense of self, which may develop into a greedy, boastful, exhibitionist, fragile or febrile personality.

“I don’t believe that children can only be cared for by their mothers — a regular childminder, for example, might be almost as good — and brain development certainly continues until the age of six and beyond. But it is indisputable that children need a consistent, loving primary carer if they are to develop a well-functioning brain. That’s why I also support the two-year parenting wage.”

The Selfish Society contains much that I find far-fetched. The relentless criticism of selfishness and capitalism seems rather over-the-top, and at times Gerhardt extends her psychotherapeutic theories too far (she asserts that “Bush ’n’ Blair” must have been mistreated as babies).

Yet, as I navigate my gondola out of Oxpip, I’m struck by the sense that hundreds of people have emerged from these doors with stronger bonds with their children, and a renewed sense of confidence in their parenting. I feel “normalised”, happier and more relaxed about my relationship with my twins. As for Isaac and Imogen, exhausted by the range of new objects they have masticated, they have fallen asleep.

'As a parent it is my duty to acknowledge that the strands that weave the tapestry of our identities are not singular, but multiple'

The prospect of Britain and Israel going to war is an unlikely one. At the orthodox Jewish school that I attended, however, it must have seemed like a distinct possibility. We used to regularly debate which side we would fight for. Although steeped in religious observance, we had been born in England, grew up here, and developed strong allegiances to English football teams. We spoke little modern Hebrew and had been to Israel just a handful of times. Nevertheless, the feeling was unanimous: we would take up arms on behalf of the Jewish state.

From one point of view, we were simply using a primitive thought experiment to mould our nascent sense of identity. At the same time, however, this was more than just an abstract exercise. Many of my schoolmates volunteered for the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) after completing their A-levels and my younger brother, Zack, was among them.

When we were growing up, every aspect of our world was dominated by religion. Outside influences were guarded against, television and non-religious music was forbidden, and only certain books were allowed. Denim and T-shirts were prohibited in favour of formal clothes in subdued colours. Our hair had to be kept short, with a prescribed length maintained around the temples. Boys and girls were kept wholly separate; it was forbidden to make even inadvertent physical contact with the opposite sex. Yet at the same time, our schools followed the national curriculum (alongside a Jewish syllabus), we spoke and thought in English, and our parents had jobs in the secular world.

All this meant that we felt profoundly alienated from the Britain that surrounded us. Notwithstanding the UK’s liberalism, we were frequently abused and sometimes attacked in the street. It was accepted by us that Jews should always have a valid passport, in case “it should happen again”. As adolescents, this social confusion and loss of identification with British society meant we needed something to rally around. Orthodox Judaism wasn’t enough, as it was defined more by what you couldn’t do than what you could. Israel, however, though we barely knew the place, gave us a banner of which we could feel proud. Our Jerusalem was not dissimilar to William Blake’s; it inspired in us a fervour that only an idealised vision could.

But Zack and I had not always been surrounded by Judaism. Our mother had grown up in a completely assimilated environment, with no connection to religion at all. Her family may be Jewish, but they have been secular for generations. The man she married – my father – is not Jewish, and until I was five, Judaism was irrelevant. I lived the life of an average English child; I still have photographs of myself at the age of three, taking part in a nativity play. Then my father left, and my mother started to attend study sessions at the local liberal synagogue. Despite her secular upbringing, she had always felt an instinctive resonance with Judaism. Gradually, she became more heavily involved, progressing through the spectrum of Judaism from liberal to reform, and eventually to orthodox.

Our lives underwent incremental changes. Dietary laws were introduced at home, then basic observance of the Sabbath. We were given new, Hebrew names and enrolled in all-Jewish schools following an orthodox ethos. As if living under a witness protection programme, before long we were completely segregated from mainstream society and living utterly different lives. We had less and less contact with my father, who as a non-Jew became increasingly isolated from our way of life. The lid was down, and for the rest of our childhoods that was how it remained.

But subversive influences were never far away. My Jewish grandfather, an avowed atheist and a rascal to the core, would delight in disparaging the “mumbo-jumbo” of religion when my mother’s back was turned. He crowed about the freedom and joie de vivre that he, as a non-believer, enjoyed. Even my mother could not help but send out mixed messages. The orthodox ideology, despite its potency, was unable to eclipse her secular upbringing; a provincial public school education had bequeathed to her an irrepressible love of early music, Georgian architecture and Victorian novels, which sat uncomfortably alongside her daily devotions and shtetl cooking. To this day, she bakes kosher mince pies at Christmas. This added extra notes of dissonance to an overwhelmingly proscriptive way of life.

Things changed for me as I finished my A-levels, when – in preparation for a planned stint in the IDF – I joined a gym. This became my first social contact with non-Jews, and it radically widened my perspective. I began to rethink my religion, and very quickly its hold over me began to fall away. I had grown tired of feeling like a perennial outsider for no discernible benefit. I’d had enough of not being able to turn lights off on a Saturday or visit non-kosher restaurants, or walk with my head uncovered; it seemed outmoded and devoid of wisdom. Before long I had abandoned my plans to join the IDF, and decided instead to spend my gap year travelling in Asia.

My mother was devastated. She believed that I was contributing towards the deterioration of Jewish traditions that had remained intact for thousands of years. But I didn’t look back. Years later, in what must have been a difficult concession, she confided that she respected my independence of mind even though she condemned my lifestyle. When I won a place at Oxford, and later published a novel, she was proud. But her pride was always tinged with sadness.

Meanwhile, Zack joined the British wing of a Jewish youth movement called Betar, a rightwing activist group linked to the modern-day Likud party. Founded in prewar Latvia, its mission statement was to engineer a breed of Jews who were “proud, generous and fierce”, in contrast to the enfeebled, ghettoised Jews of eastern Europe. Zack was initially attracted by the paintball, barbecues and trips to Israel. Over time, however, he learned of the organisation’s history. This was a group that fought the Nazis in the Warsaw ghetto uprising, rescued 40,000 Jews from the Holocaust in daring evacuations to Palestine, and – under the command of Menachem Begin – drove the British out of the Jewish homeland by force of arms. Betar provided Zack with a red-blooded ideology, one more compelling than stultifying religion, and infused with a sense of adventure. Here at last was a legitimate way to escape the claustrophobia of orthodoxy, and it led directly to Israel and the IDF.

I remember trying to talk him out of joining the army. At the time, my position was weak; my ideology and politics were in flux, and my arguments were nowhere near as coherent as Zack’s. He, on the other hand, was filled with certainty. His ambiguities and frustrations had been transmuted into a pride in being part of a people that has survived for thousands of years, in the teeth of the most prolonged and vicious persecution the world has ever known. He argued that rather than seeking to keep the outside world – in all its manifestations – at bay, Zionism meant creating and defending a land of our own where we could live in freedom. If Israel had existed in 1939, he said, the Holocaust may never have happened. In Israel, things are different. Israel belongs to us. It may be far from secure, but it is a place where a Jew can live – and if necessary die – with pride, and in freedom.

Zack was trained as a combat medic. His army service was spent largely on the West Bank, patrolling the perimeter fence, manning checkpoints, quelling riots, and supporting commando incursions. He remained in the army for 18 months, and, to my relief, during that time he neither seriously injured anybody, nor was seriously injured himself. He returned to England a changed person. Changed, I had to admit, for the better. The army had given him a new fortitude, an easy independence and a keen sense of duty. No longer was he troubled by the stifling excesses of diaspora orthodoxy. The army had changed him into a man.

Over the years, my relationship with Judaism has evolved. I have never entertained the possibility of returning to the religion, but I have been involved with the wider community to a greater or lesser extent, not least through my writing. I am finishing an intricately researched novel about the Kindertransport, in which I have a very deep personal investment. In some ways, I envy the certainty that Zack enjoys. I have three children now – a two-year-old and six-month-old twins – and my partner is not Jewish – or at least, her father is Jewish but not her mother, which is unacceptable from the orthodox perspective. What is missing for people such as me, who have found the dominant cultures of their birth untenable, is a coherent group mythology, shared traditions and a sense of belonging.

Isobel and I have been engaged for years but we remain unmarried, as we didn’t know what sort of wedding we wanted and whether everybody would come and support it. Yet despite all this, I feel content that my children will be brought up without restrictions, prejudice or superstition. They will understand which things in life are knowable and which are not, and I will never try to tell them otherwise. As a parent it is my duty to acknowledge that the strands that weave the tapestry of our identities are not singular, but multiple. What they choose to do in their own lives is up to them, but my hope is that what they lose in tradition, they will gain in integrity.

'America's brainiest couple'

The people known as “America’s brainiest couple” met over an irregular verb. “It was ‘stridden’,” says Steven Pinker, regarding me steadily from beneath his mop of curly hair. His wife, Rebecca Goldstein, laughs. “Steven cited my use of the word in one of his books,” she explains, “and we started exchanging e-mails about it. You could say that our relationship started with conjugation.”

There could have been no more appropriate way for these two extraordinary minds to meet. Pinker, one of Time magazine’s 100 most influential people, is a renowned cognitive psychologist and the author of bestselling books on popular science. Goldstein, a novelist and philosopher, has received a MacArthur “Genius” Award, a Koret International Award and election to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Her new novel, the mischievously titled 36 Arguments for the Existence of God: a Work of Fiction (Goldstein warns me not to leave out the subtitle) is released in the UK this month.

Life chez Goldstein-Pinker involves a stream of intellectual banter, in-jokes and puns. “Ever since I won the Genius Award, the jokes have been endless,” Goldstein says. “Whenever I burn the dinner Steve playfully mentions it.”

Not that they are prone to antagonism. “We’ve never had a disagreement, and that’s an absolute truth,” says the philosopher. “We have code phrases for everything that only the two of us understand.” Can she share any? She thinks for a moment. “Do you know?” she says. “My mind’s gone completely blank.”

The couple are not without their personal eccentricities — she is an insomniac, he is obsessed with gadgets — but over the years they have grown increasingly symbiotic. “It is no accident that my latest book, The Stuff of Thought, incorporates philosophy,” Pinker explains. Likewise, Goldstein finds his input invaluable. “I used to be very private about my writing,” she says, “but now I can’t imagine how I wrote anything without Steven’s feedback.” It suddenly seems a little less strange to be interviewing two people about one novel.

Goldstein’s 36 Arguments is a philosopher’s novel about atheism and spirituality. Set in the world of American academia, it centres on Cass Seltzer, a psychologist of religion who “has a fundamental niceness written all over him”. Seltzer has become a celebrity through the unexpected success of his book on atheism,The Varieties of Religious Illusion, the title of which is a nod to William James and Sigmund Freud — one of the subtle and not-so-subtle digs at the excesses of academia that stipple the book.

Seltzer is no Richard Dawkins. Despite his atheism he is subject to the religious impulse, experiencing an “expansion out into the world, which is a kind of love, a love for the whole of existence”, and having the sense that “the Universe is personal, there is something personal that grounds existence and order and value and purpose and meaning”.

Dubbed “the atheist with a soul” by the media, Seltzer has been suddenly granted wealth, fame, a beautiful girlfriend and a lucrative offer from Harvard. And he is “grateful” to the Universe in a spiritual, if not religious, sense.

Through a corkscrewing narrative the novel embarks on a retrospective of Seltzer’s journey, featuring a professor- guru by the name of Jonas Elijah Klapper (a “Jewish walrus” with a messiah complex); two previous romantic interests and a trip into the heart of Jewish spirituality by way of a fictional Orthodox congregation nicknamed “America’s only shtetl” (a small town).

All of this adds up to a world view that seems inconsistent. While atheism is clearly being promoted — an appendix attempts to debunk the existence of God in 36 pithy refutations — the novel is nevertheless imbued with the full richness of human spiritual experience. “I wrote the book because I felt something was missing from Dawkins and the New Atheists,” Goldstein says. “Of course, I agree with them philosophically. But their raging debate takes place purely on the intellectual plane. They just don’t know how spirituality feels from the inside. Religious world views go deep down, they are so vital and sensual. Only a novel could get at that. Even Steven felt more of what it would be like to have a spiritual experience after reading my novel.”

Pinker nods bashfully and smiles. “There is no such thing as different types of atheism,” he points out. “If you don’t believe in God, that’s an absolute position. “We’re both atheists,” Pinker says, “ it’s just that Rebecca has a better phenomenological understanding of the spiritual experience.”

This is connected to her Orthodox Jewish upbringing. “My father was a cantor,” she says, “and as a teenager I was sent to an incredibly right-wing religious school. I used to play truant and sneak off to the library to read philosophy. By the time I was 15 I no longer believed in God.” Although she found religion “stifling”, it also gave her a “deep sense of value for the transcendent experience”.

The key figure in Goldstein’s philosophical evolution was the 17th-century Jewish philosopher Baruch Spinoza — the subject of her 2006 book Betraying Spinoza — who in 1656 was excommunicated for his beliefs. “His spirit hovers over the novel,” she says. “He was the main inspiration behind it.”

She was introduced to the philosopher at school. “My teachers saw Spinoza as a heretic,” she recalls. “He denied the concept of a personal, creator God whose purpose infiltrates reality. Instead, he identified God with the laws of nature. I felt an affinity with this pantheistic approach.”

Spinoza is often seen as a proto-atheist. According to Goldstein he offers spiritualised secularism. “He wants us to seek an experience of awe and transcendence through striving passionately to understand the laws of nature, in all their intricacy,” she says. “To be in a state of expansive understanding is to experience a very powerful emotion, very loving and grateful. Both transcendent emotion and the grounds for morality are included in this secular context — both a largeness of spirit and a thoroughgoing, ethical way of life.”

Goldstein’s novel, with its emphasis on reconciling the intellectual rigour of New Atheism with a thirst for transcendence, is a thoroughly Spinozan project. “Spinoza is the great reconciler of things that seem to be polar opposites,” she says. “Mind and body, reason and spirituality. Maybe that’s a deeper sense in which Spinoza’s spirit hovers over the novel.”

“From my point of view I have a degree of respect for religious experience, and a fondness for Judaism,” Pinker says. “But I find it difficult to relate to these spiritual epiphanies. As a scientist I have every reason to believe that they arise from information-processing activity in the brain, not the spark of a soul.”

Be that as it may, it is refreshing to hear an atheist academic speak in such terms. As I say goodbye to America’s brainiest couple I can’t help wondering if Goldstein’s novel might just represent a first small step into a post-New-Atheist world.

36 Arguments for the Existence of God: A Work of Fiction, by Rebecca Goldstein, Atlantic Books (£12.99; offer price £11.69)

'I was determined to give as good as I got'

Denis Avey, even at the age of 91, cuts a formidable figure. More than 6ft tall, with a severe short back and sides and a piercing glare, he combines the pan-ache of Errol Flynn with the dignity of age. This is the former Desert Rat, who, in 1944, broke into — yes, into — Auschwitz, and he looks exactly as I expected. He removes his monocle for the camera, and one of his pupils slips sideways before realigning. It is a glass eye. I ask him about it. He tells me that in 1944, he cursed an SS officer who was beating a Jew in the camp. He received a blow with a pistol butt and his eye was knocked in.

If Avey’s story is difficult to believe, it is worth bearing in mind that it is not without precedent. In 1944, the British PoW Charlie Coward, a sergeant-major from the Royal Artillery who had attempted escape 14 times, infiltrated the camp dressed as a Jewish prisoner to gather intelligence from a British Jewish naval doctor interned there. After the war, Coward testified at the IG Farben trial in Nuremberg. His life story was made into a film The Password is Courage in 1962, starring Dirk Bogarde.

Yad Vashem, the Israeli Holocaust authority, is in the final stages of researching aspects of Avey’s story with the intention of granting him the title of Righteous Among the Nations. “For obvious reasons this honour cannot be based on Avey’s word alone,” says Susan Weisberg, spokeswoman for Yad Vashem. “Each case must be substantiated by eyewitness testimonies and archival documents of the period.”

Avey, born in 1919 on an Essex farm, lived a rough-and-tumble lifestyle and grew into a daredevil. “I once jumped from a branch 45ft high, just for the thrill of it,” he says. “I had a shock of red hair and a temperament to match.”

He also had an affinity for the underdog. As head boy of his school, he used his physical strength to protect the weaker boys. “If there is one thing I’ve always abhorred it is bullying,” he says. “I could dish it out back then. Legislation wouldn’t let me now.”

These traits would serve him well at war. In 1939 he volunteered for the Army — because he was too impatient to wait a week for the RAF. “I ended up in the 7th Armoured Division, the original Desert Rats,” he says. “We operated behind enemy lines in Egypt. In 1942 we were ambushed. I was wounded and taken prisoner by the Germans.”

Avey was a troublesome prisoner. In the summer of 1943 he was deported to Auschwitz, in Poland, and interned in a small PoW camp on the periphery of the IG Farben factory. The main Jewish camps were several miles to the west. “I’d lost my liberty, but none of my spirit,” he says. “I was still determined to give as good as I got.”

But he knew immediately that this was a different order of prison. “The Stripeys — that’s what we called the Jewish prisoners — were in a terrible state. Within months they were reduced to waifs and then they disappeared. The stench from the crematoria was appalling, civilians from as far away as Katowice were complaining. Everybody knew what was going on. Everybody knew.”

Remarkably, Avey was able to think beyond the war. “I knew in my gut that these swine would eventually be held to account,” he says. “Evidence would be vital. Of course, sneaking into the Jewish camp was a ludicrous idea. It was like breaking into Hell. But that’s the sort of chap I was. Reckless.”

According to the historian Sir Martin Gilbert, Avey’s hunch was right. “Auschwitz would not become known as a place of extermination until the spring of 1944,” he says. “When the world found out, there was outrage. After the war, British war crimes investigators were desperate to find PoWs with information about the camps.”

Avey’s audacious plan was made possible by Ernst Lobethall, a German Jew from Breslau, who worked alongside Avey at the Farben factory. Although fraternising was forbidden on pain of death, the two men became friends. “We spoke out of the corner of our mouths,” Avey says, “a difficult thing to do in German.”

He discovered that Lobethall had a sister, Susana, living in England. “I wrote to my mother, who told Susana that Ernst was alive. She posted 200 cigarettes to me via the Red Cross. Miraculously, four months later, they arrived. The cigarettes were worth a king’s ransom. Ernst suddenly became rich.”

With the cigarettes, Lobethall was able to buy boots and scraps of food that would later save his life. He also used them as bribes to help Avey to gain entrance to the Jewish camp.

“Despite the danger, I knew I had to bear witness,” Avey says. “As Albert Einstein said: the world can be an evil place, not because of those who do evil, but because of those who look on and do nothing. I’ve never been one to do nothing.”

The operation was planned meticulously. Avey found a Dutch Jew with a similar physique and persuaded him to exchange places for a day. Avey knew that they marched past each other at the same time every week. “The Nazis were rigid, you see,” he says. “To them orders were orders, to be carried out exactly. That was what allowed me to find a way round them.”

Avey shaved his head and blackened his face. At the allocated time, he and the Dutch Jew sneaked into a disused shed. There they swapped uniforms and exchanged places. Avey affected a slouch and a cough, so that his English accent would be disguised should he be required to speak.

“I joined the Stripeys and marched into Monowitz, a predominantly Jewish camp. As we passed beneath the Arbeit Macht Frei [work makes you free] sign, everyone stood up straight and tried to look as healthy as they could. There was an SS officer there, weeding out the weaklings for the gas. Overhead was a gallows, which had a corpse hanging from it, as a deterrent. An orchestra was playing Wagner to accompany our march. It was chilling.”

They were herded through the camp, carrying the bodies of those who had died that day. “I saw the Frauenhaus — the Germans’ brothel of Jewish girls — and the infirmary, which sent its patients to the gas after two weeks. I committed everything to memory. We were lined up in the Appellplatz for a roll call, which lasted almost two hours. Then we were given some rotten cabbage soup and went to sleep in lice-infested bunks, three to a bed.”

The night was even worse than the daytime. “As it grew dark, the place was filled with howls and shrieks. Many people had lost their minds. It was a living hell. Everyone was clutching their wooden bowls under their heads, to stop them getting stolen.” Lobethall had bribed Avey’s bedfellows with cigarettes. “They gave me all the details,” he says, “the names of the SS, the gas chambers, the crematoria, everything. After that, they fell asleep. But I lay awake all night.”

In the morning, Avey joined other prisoners for a roll call, followed by “breakfast” — a husk of black bread with a scrape of fetid margarine. “It wasn’t enough to sustain life. Everything was designed to make you waste away.” They were formed into groups and marched out of the camp, again to the accompaniment of an orchestra.

“When we passed the shed again, I slipped in to meet the Dutch Jew,” he says. “That was hair raising. Although I trusted him, I couldn’t be sure that he’d turn up. And if an SS officer had looked in the wrong direction at the wrong time, that would have been it.”

The changeover went smoothly, and Avey returned to the PoW camp. “The Dutch Jew perished, but I’m certain that this short reprieve prolonged his life by several weeks,” he says. “Whether that was a good thing, I don’t know.”

In 1945, as the Soviet Army closed in, the Nazis abandoned the camp and herded 60,000 prisoners in the direction of Germany, in what would become known as one of Death Marches. Avey, who by then was suffering from tuberculosis, was among them. Around 15,000 prisoners died on the way. “The road was littered with corpses,” he says. “I saw a chance to escape and seized it.”

He found his way to Allied lines and was transported back home. Two days before VE Day, he arrived at his parents’ Essex farm half-dead with exhaustion and sickness. They had not expected to see him again.

If Avey’s story still sounds implausible, there is no doubt about the help he gave to Lobethall. Last year the BBC screened a moving documentary, during which Avey learnt for the first time that his old friend had survived the war and died in New York in 2001. Before his death, Lobethall recorded a video testimony for Steven Spielberg’s Shoah Foundation, during which he emotionally recounts how his life was saved by Avey’s initiative and Susana’s cigarettes. This is the only moment that I see Avey’s steely façade falter.

“I was hospitalised for two years after the war,” Avey continues. “In 1947, I went to the military authorities to submit my information about Auschwitz. Their eyes glazed over. I wasn’t taken seriously. I was shocked, especially after the risks I’d taken. I felt completely disillusioned, and traumatised as well. So from then on I bottled it up, and tried to piece my life back together.”

Sir Martin Gilbert says: “By 1947, the trials of Nazi war criminals had been and gone. The war was over and people just wanted to get on with their lives. There was a whole mind-set of not really wanting to know what had happened any more. Many people had stories that nobody was interested in. It must have been very painful.”

Readjusting to normal life was hard. Avey became addicted to adrenalin, racing fast cars, travelling to Spain for the running of the bulls. He was plagued by nightmares and flashbacks. Even today he shows signs of trauma. He always carries an expensive gold watch, so that “if ever I find myself in a fix again, I’ve got something to fall back on”.

Sixty-five years after the liberation of Auschwitz, when eyewitnesses are dying out and Holocaust denial is burgeoning, Denis Avey’s extraordinary tale has finally found its moment. “I’m talking to you so it will do some good,” he says fiercely, pounding his fingers on the table for emphasis. “That’s all I’ve ever wanted.”

'the men of happiness'

It is a most unlikely scene. I am in an elegant sitting room in the Royal Society of Arts. Opposite me, sitting uncomfortably side-by-side on a too-low leather sofa, are an English peer and a French Buddhist monk. The contrast is striking. Lord Layard is white-haired, well-dressed and unobtrusive; the Venerable Matthieu Ricard is larger than life in flowing, burgundy robes. Yet despite their differences, these men have a common denominator: both have devoted their lives to the study of happiness.

Layard is the UK’s leading happiness economist. In his bookHappiness: Lessons from a New Science, Layard — a devotee of the 18th-century Utilitarian thinker Jer-emy Bentham — argues that governments need to take their responsibilities for our happiness seriously. “We need a wider debate about what lifestyles are conducive to happiness,” he says.

“Far more public funding should be allocated to mental-health services, parenting support networks, and positive-living education in schools. Everyone is concerned with avoiding poverty, ill health, conflict and enslavement. But these things are nothing but versions of unhappiness. So what we’re all really concerned with, although we might be afraid of the simplicity of the term, is happiness.”

Ricard, on the other hand, a celibate monk who lives in a Himalayan hermitage, has a different perspective. He is a proponent of the Buddhist theory that cultural change can start only with the individual. His latest book, The Art of Meditation, which came out last month, focuses on matters of the mind, such as meditation and altruism. Whereas Layard believes that there are seven areas of life — family, work, health, mental attitude and so on — that influence fulfilment and happiness, Ricard believes that the mind trumps all. “If you have inner peace,” he says, “then whatever happens, you are going to be fine.”

He has demonstrated this in his own life by eschewing intimate relationships, children and a career in favour of a life of the mind. Leading neuroscientists have said that Ricard is the happiest man in the world. While this epithet is unashamedly hyperbolic (how many men in the world have been tested for happiness?), the results of experiments are remarkable. Brain scans found that Ricard’s grey matter produces a level of gamma waves — those linked to consciousness, attention, learning and memory — never “reported before in the neuroscience literature”, according to Dr Richard Davidson, a neuroscientist at the University of Wisconsin.

In addition, his brain is dramatically asymmetrical. The left prefrontal cortex is swollen, while its counterpart on the right is shrivelled and prune-like. No prizes for guessing what each cranial bedfellow is responsible for; Ricard has an abnormally large propensity for happiness, and his capacity for negativity has all but withered away.

“It’s not just the brain that is measured,” the monk elaborates. His gaze is steady and he speaks in a gruff French accent. “Scientists study a combination of factors, the brain, the movements of the muscles in the face, the ability to remain calm, and so on. Those things, when taken together, can indicate a more optimal healthy mind.”

Be this as it may, I am sceptical about the happiest man in the world. Partly it is the notion of a celebrity Buddhist monk, which I find rather disingenuous (memories of the Dalai Lama appearing on advertisements for Apple come to mind). Partly there is something suspicious about people writing books about how happy they are.

But most of all it is the fact that I spent several years practising Tibetan Buddhism, and ended up rather disillusioned. I became unconvinced by the disproportionate focus on mental development at the expense of other aspects of life. The Dalai Lama, although believed to be the embodiment of the Compassion Deity, said in a 2004 interview that he shoots at birds from the roof of his monastery; he also admitted to having “a bad temper”. Additionally, he is involved in factional infighting, a pervasive element of Tibetan history. My conclusion, therefore, was that although Buddhism can improve your wellbeing to a certain extent, the complete transcendence of human frailty is impossible.

Feeling obliged to strive towards it is a burden. As Edith Wharton put it “if only we’d stop trying to be happy, we could have a pretty good time”.

“I’m not saying everybody has to take on Tibetan beliefs,” the monk says. “If concert pianists were the only ones allowed to play the piano, millions of people would be deprived of the pleasure of music. I am suggesting that the idea of secular spirituality, which the Dalai Lama has been promoting for many years, is an important one.

“I do not think you will attain enlightenment through secular spirituality, but at least you will become a happier person.”

This may be true. However, I know from my time in Buddhism that while many practitioners may look happier, all too often they are repressing their emotions. I saw a monk snap once. He assaulted a member of the public with a pair of woks. Science may have found that Ricard experiences great levels of happiness, but what about the dark mysteries of the unconscious?

Neuroscientists have found “that advanced monks have extremely lucid insights into what is going on in their minds”, he says. “For example, in experiments where meditators must recall their emotions after watching a horror movie, they are able to write three pages describing what they experienced, but normal people can only write two lines.”

Monks watching a horror movie? He shrugs and purses his lips in a distinctly Gallic fashion. “It was an experiment.”

Having established that Ricard does not expect everyone to share his beliefs, I am starting to warm towards him. There are no forced smiles or the excessive displays of physical affection common to many Western Buddhist converts. He isn’t putting on an act; he wears his robes lightly. Nevertheless, there seems to be a discrepancy between his secular advice and his deeply religious life. I turn to Lord Layard, director of the wellbeing programme at the LSE’s Centre for Economic Performance.

“I was particularly struck at the end of the 1970s by evidence that although people were getting richer, they were not growing any happier,” he says. “That is why I have been putting a huge emphasis on schooling. If we could be taught at an early age to observe and manage our emotions, people would become calm in themselves and more able to give to others. I’m not starting from a monastery, I’m starting from an interest in public policy. But the overall vision of a good society is very similar.”

Ricard, who has been murmuring his agreement, takes up the baton again. “Many schools are starting to incorporate silence into the day,” he says. “Of course elaborate meditation is inappropriate for children. But a simple daily meditation on altruism, for example, can change the whole character and mood of the school.”

“You see,” Layard says, “I think our common ground is more important than our differences. It is the responsibility of government to create a society where we have the space and support to be happy. Meditation and altruism can help to fill this space, enhancing our happiness as individuals. The philosophies of East and West do not need to be mutually exclusive. We can both learn from one another, and combine our approaches to good effect.”

My cynicism begins to recede. Perhaps this unlikely pair have hit on something. Clearly the world would be a better place if governments geared social policy more towards happiness; and if meditation has been proven to make us happier, perhaps it wouldn’t hurt to incorporate those parts that are in tune with secular society?

They are gesturing towards a vision of how Eastern and Western philosophies of happiness might one day harmonise to the common good. The outside-in approach of Bentham, combined with the inside-out philosophy of the Buddha, might work together very well as long as repression and superstition are left at the door.