Quirky Nordic farce set in a seedy Stockholm hotel.IF IT'S CHEERFUL YOU WANT.Hitman Anders and the Meaning of It All by Jonas Jonasson (Fourth Estate)Quirky Nordic farce set in a seedy Stockholm hotel; a hitman who's having doubts about his line of work, a woman priest who's just been fired because she doesn't believe in God, and a bitter, disillusioned receptionist embark upon an unintentional, somewhat manic adventure.THE ISSUE"One bright night in the year 2016, my face aglow with god-knows how many MilliGAUSS of x-radiation from the computer screen in front of me, I was surfing the net when I moused upon a web node reading: THE MYSTERY OF LANGUAGE EVOLUTION." So begins The Kingdom of Speech (Little, Brown), a provocative polemic that marks an 85-year-old Tom Wolfe's return to non-fiction.The bumf suggests that it's going to arouse much debate when it hits the shelves later this month with its "paradigm-shifting" thesis that it is speech - and not evolution - that is responsible for humanity's complex societies and achievements.The book is slight, just 192 pages (the novels average about 700-odd pages), and while it is true that some of Wolfe's non-fiction books have been shorter (The Painted Word is 110 or so pages; Radical Chic & Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers is 144), this one covers vast tracts of territory: the Big Bang theory of creation, Charles Darwin's theory of evolution, the great divide between humans and animals that is speech, and sets about trashing, in Wolfe's trademark fizzy style, some sacred cows. Darwin gets the treatment (condescending, rich English gentleman scientist) as does the book's "villain": Noam Chomsky, whom Wolfe regards as an elite, leftist ivory tower intellectual and myth maker.Some of it does seem a bit higher grade, but the fuss about The Kingdom of Speech may just generate renewed interest in Wolfe's earlier journalism. It would be good to see his earlier classics, like The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby, The Pump House Gang, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test and, arguably his best work, The Right Stuff back in our stores again.CRASH COURSEClive James's TV reviews for The Observer in the 1970s considerably raised the bar for the form, and his first collection of columns, Visions Before Midnight, became mandatory reading for would-be Pauline Kaels of the small screen. James has now returned to television - sort of - with a fascinating treatise on the rise of the box set and the streaming culture, Play All: A Bingewatcher's Notebook (Yale University Press). Expect an entertaining analysis of the cable, box-top and broadband "cord-cutting" revolution via such acclaimed series as The Sopranos, Breaking Bad, The West Wing and Mad Men.THE BOTTOM LINE"Pretending that America has grown rich as a largely classless society is bad history, to say the least." - White Trash: The 400-year Untold History of Class in America by Nancy Isenberg (Viking)..