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Side Effects is Adam Phillips’ twelfth book. That is impressive in itself. It is a collection of thirteen essays which were originally written as talks, lectures or articles for various esteemed establishments and publications, for example, The British Academy, the London Review of Books, the Squiggle Foundation, and Oxford University. Consequently, the focus of each essay varies according to the audience that Phillips must have had in mind. He covers a lot of ground as he darts in and out of the obstacles of desire, expectation, dreams, paranoia, perversion, love and endings, to name a few. These are all very big subjects which cannot be attended to in depth in the space of an essay, so Phillips aims to seize sharp points, which he can then turn inside out. Having read Side Effects for the first time, I felt as if my mind had ground to a halt and could no longer think. It was difficult to know how much this was to do with my envy of Phillips’ eloquence or an inability to think on my part. The latter seemed less likely than the former and after a brief amount of research, I was relieved to find that I was not the only reader who has felt like this after reading this book.