A classic

Brilliant.

A masterly book

This is a very funny book, but Carlo Cipolla's underlying insight really matters: there's a lot of stupidity about, including in society's highest circles – and the stupid wield a surprising amount of power, because the rest of us can never guess what idiotic thing they'll do next. We need to get wise to stupidity, and Cipolla's drily witty rules are a great place to start.

Cipolla’s subtle tongue-in-cheek humour made this book an underground classic in Italy. Today, under current worldwide political trends, it reads more like black humour. Keep in mind: reliable statistical data shows that 98% of the people seriously believe that they are far less stupid than the average.

Subtly lacerating

The more you confront actual stupidity in everyday life, the more infuriating it is, whereas the more you contemplate it in the abstract, the more amusing it becomes. Cipolla finds the perfect tone to handle this paradox. On the page, he is arch and slightly annoyed, with a good deal of mock scholarly gravity thrown in.... Cipolla is very droll, and his theories-however deeply he has implanted his tongue in his cheek-have a helpful, clarifying quality

a timely book that is a reminder that meritocracy, for all its flaws, may well be, like the democracy it has sometimes served, better than the alternatives ... told with a wealth of erudition in brisk and readable prose

There are few terms whose origins are more misunderstood than "meritocracy". So Adrian Wooldridge has performed a public service with his latest book, The Aristocracy of Talent.

Adrian Wooldridge sees meritocracy as a revolutionary idea worth improving, not abandoning. He ranges across two and a half thousand years of history, surveying many societies and cultures, to remind us that until relatively recently the talented were almost always a matter of no interest to the rulers - not only unrewarded but undiscovered ... [a] rich stew of a book. Alongside the philosophers are innumerable politicians, theologians, scientists, academics, authors and campaigners. He has dug up a priceless array of quotes from all perspectives on how to define the best people, how to seek them out, how to educate them, how to test them, how to give them power, even how they should behave.

In this elegant historical and philosophical defence of the notion that people should advance according to talent rather than birth, Wooldridge argues that the idea that ruled the world by the late 20th century has become corrupted. This "golden ticket to prosperity" needs restoring in order to revive social mobility.

an omniscient and impassioned polemic ... Some of us have been waiting a long time for someone to do what Wooldridge has done: nail the lie that there is something shameful about success honestly earned

The Aristocracy of Talent is both an exhaustively researched history of an idea and a many-sided examination of the impacts of its imperfect execution.

A worthy successor to the 1958 classic The Rise of the Meritocracy, this sparkling study shows how much less meritocratic our society has become since then

Wooldridge has written one of the great books of the decade. Here, meticulously researched and in arresting prose, are definitive accounts of Plato's authoritarian philosophy and the way later generations interpreted it, of China's mandarinate, of the rise of IQ tests and much else.

with its remorseless erudition ... in his new book, Adrian Wooldridge tries to salvage meritocracy from the ossified over-class that Aldous Huxley foresaw.

Adrian Wooldridge relabels the system "pluto-meritocracy" to expose its sham ideology

readable and wide-ranging...Wooldridge maintains that meritocracy is revolutionary and egalitarian

Every page, there's an intriguing nugget of information.

kudos to Adrian Wooldridge... for producing a full-throated defence of the principle

An elegant defence of talent.