Peter Hobson is Professor of Developmental Psychopathology at the Tavistock Clinic and the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioural Sciences at University College, London. In The Cradle of Thought, he has produced an immensely readable and enjoyable work, filled with interesting anecdotes, excerpts from poetry and, especially, humour. He draws on his varied experience as a medically trained psychiatrist, as an experimental psychologist, and as a psychoanalyst trained at the Institute of Psychoanalysis in