Robert Howard presents the proceedings of another of the admirable Maudsley courses. We are not told its date, but evidence suggests 1998. It is an excellent update, although not cheap (except perhaps by comparison with attending the course) and given its ephemeral nature might have been more worthy of paperback format. The range is apt and wide. It includes genetics and prions; clinical, forensic and service aspects of the dementias; ethical questions; and a range of topics on functional disorders.

The contributors include many of the ‘usual suspects’, as well as less familiar names, and the standard of content and presentation is high. There is much nowadays that is technical and intricate, and some sections need close attention, but reading this book is real ‘CPD’. None of the contributions reads like a mere verbatim text of a talk, and several must have been extensively reworked or re-edited for the book (at least, one hopes they were, for they would have made difficult listening). Thus, the pitfalls of publishing ‘conference proceedings’ have been successfully avoided.

Daunting, alongside some of the science, are names of new drugs, many being no doubt electronic coinages. A course of some of the listed new anti-depressants, at £30 or £40 per month, may cost twenty or thirty times as much as a similar course of amitriptyline. This raises the naughty thought of a trial of the effect on their depression of giving to some depressed old people, instead of the drug, an equivalent addition to their pension. Happily, since the book was published, some prices have come down somewhat from those quoted.

My only small gripe is the dumbed-down title: Aubrey Lewis would shudder, and rightly. The editor writes that he chose the title in a “ particularly cheerful and expansive state of mind”, thereby leaving much to the imagination. But no one should be adding to the dumbing down that is already ubiquitous in academia, and the book, good as it is, is a long way from being ‘everything’. Perhaps Dr Howard might choose an alternative for the future volumes (and courses), which one hopes that he will continue to produce.