Pollard in pain

Daredevil Stephen Pollard, the man who likes to be attacked, has found one sort of pain he doesn't like - and this time it's self-inflicted. Pollard, who came through unscathed after an attack by dead sheep David Aaronovitch, found that in attempting to read Tom Nairn's "Pariah" he'd bitten off more than he could chew. He said: "I cannot remember feeling pain before when reading a book. Boredom, yes. Annoyance, yes. But not real, physical pain. Pariah, however, is so turgid, so overwritten, so trite, so predictable and above all so deeply, deeply pointless that...I began to ache, and not just in my head."

Although stopping short of demanding that that "Pariah" be classified along with heroin and LSD Pollard gave a stern warning to anyone thinking of picking up the book. He said: "Please, please don’t look at this book. With one in five of the adult population functionally illiterate, ‘Britain’ can’t afford to lose any of those of us who can read, and if you start Pariah you may, like me, start losing the will to live."