This series seems to be self-consciously launched out of Barthes' Mythologies, each one offering up a riff on a common, often pedestrian, mundane, and over-looked object - here the burger.

Siting this somewhere between an essay, a piece of journalism, and a cultural history, Adams is a witty commentator and manages to pack in a huge amount of material, some expected (the history of McDonalds, for example), some weirdly, wonderfully unpredictable: burgers and feminism, burgers and pornography, as a er... taster.

Throughout, this is droll and sharp ('as the hamburger business grew, so did the size of the hamburger. Soon their names seemed to be recalling the way men discuss their erections: The Thick Burger, The Whopper, The Big Mac, The Big Boy, The Chubby Boy') - and at around a hour/hour and a half, this is an ideal 'thought-piece' read for a commute.