A compendium of insane British Bureaucracy

Everyone has a call-centre story or some nightmare encounter at the hands of 'customer services' to relate. The Little Black Book of Red Tape is a kind of compendium of such stories, a sort of almanac of the bullshit of the modern world, and a catalogue of individual heroic battles against the corporate state.

It features the Derby householder who is selling off minute plots of his back garden to well wishers around the world for £1 each to prevent the council putting a bypass through it; the Shropshire bus service that doesn't stop as 'stopping disrupts the timetable'; and the hospital recently fined £2.5 million for using 'spare capacity' to treat patients quickly.

Ian Vince