Copyright 1992 Guardian Newspapers Limited The Guardian

January 9, 1992

SECTION: FEATURES; Pg. 22

LENGTH: 527 words

HEADLINE: PAPERBACKS: BAYLEY OFFERS THE TINGLE TEST OF GOOD TASTE

BYLINE: AFSHIN RATTANSI

BODY:

Taste, by Stephen Bayley (Faber, pounds 15.99)

LET Stephen Bayley change your taste in clothes, furniture and food so no one will roll their eyes again at the alabaster eggs on your mantelpiece. He is director of London's Design Museum, so this book is liable to become a standard art school reference work.

Bayley, in subscribing to the recession-created aesthetics promoted by a few design magazines, treads a relativist path. He hijacks Roland Barthes while depoliticising his work. Barthes is exotic enough to be "great" while Raymond Williams is all but ignored.

His thesis is that though "good design" transcends its time, "good taste" is vulnerable to fashion. But Bayley destroys his own thesis by muddling his argument to show that taste and design are inextricably linked.

It is a fascinating book not least for the influence of his thesis when allied to the power of industrialists such as Sir Terence Conran.

The Greening Of A Red, by Malcolm MacEwen (Pluto Press, pounds 8.95)

UNDERESTIMATING the possible is the world's deadliest virus, but Malcolm MacEwen has a vaccine. This autobiography, prefaced by E P Thompson, is about a life changed by a motorcycle accident. It cost him a leg but during six months' convalescence he found another way of seeing the world.

MacEwen incisively analyses the Parliamentary Labour Party's support of the United States' genocidal excursions in Korea. Having been accused of the capital offence of treason, he is well-placed to document Attlee's hysterical attack on the Left and his subsequent introduction of NHS fees to pay for rearmament against the Soviet menace.

Despite MacEwen's intention to write an optimistic book about how Green politics has breathed new life into socialism, this is a profoundly depressing memoir.

Scum Of The Earth, by Arthur Koestler (Eland, pounds 6.99)

ONE of the greatest books to come out of the second world war now carries a tragic irony. The reverberations of its author's suicide in 1983 spill over into one's reading of it.

In 1939, Koestler was living in the South of France working on Darkness At Noon. Moving to Paris to enlist with the Allies he was, along with thousands of others who had fought Fascism around Europe, imprisoned as an undesirable alien. Life in the camp, which German emigres testified to being comparable with Dachau, is illuminated by a writer whose humanity, optimism and intelligence shine on every page.

The Book Of Disquiet, by Fernando Pessoa, translated by Iain Watson (Quartet, pounds 5.95)

IN THE popular literary imagination, Lisbon is famous for only earthquakes and fires. Quartet has transformed this reputation forever with the first British publication of Portugal's greatest 20th century writer. Reading it in 1991, one gets an exaggerated sense of what it was for Camus and Sartre to discover Kafka.

Devoid of a narrative line, this is really only half of the actual book. Most of Pessoa's writing was published posthumously: this is merely a selection of writings grouped by themes. Pessoa paints a picture of an existence blighted by boredom, decadence and despair.