When Sideshow was published a while back, it landed to plenty of detailed and more or less informed coverage and commentary - so much so that I almost felt I didn't need to read the book itself. But it's an easy, interesting read, and I've worked my way through it at intervals; its central set of premises - about the relationship between contemporary media, political discourse and the practice of politics itself, and the increasing trivialisation of all of the above - is plainly unarguable (though a proper analysis of their complex connections to each other and to wider trends in society would be the subject of a much more detailed work than Tanner's book sets out to be), and Tanner's experience in the belly of the system adds to the analysis.
