It’s the latest by Edward de Bono, Michael Bichard’s pet thinker, recruited by the permanent secretary to run a lateral-thinking seminar for officials a while back.

Called New Thinking for the New Millennium (groan - doesn’t the word “millennium” sound a bit ... 20th century to you?), its motto is “You can analyse the past, but you have to design the future.”

It’s fullof insights such as: “Food without any salt tastes bad. Some salt is good. Too much salt is again bad. I sometimes call this the salt curve.”

De Bono has also “randomised” the text, cutting it up into a jumble of thought-provoking ideas, so that reading it is “more like proceeding through the experiences of life than walking down a pathway set for you.”

Very clever. Except, as the author points out: “Cleverness is a sharp-focus camera. Wisdom is a wide-angle lens. Many clever people are not wise.” Quite.