A visual guide to the way the world really works. Every day, every hour, every minute we are bombarded by information – from television, from newspapers, from the internet, we’re steeped in it, maybe even lost in it. We need a new way to relate to it, to discover the beauty and the fun of information for information’s sake. No dry facts, theories or statistics.

Instead, ‘Information is Beautiful’ contains visually stunning displays of information that blend the facts with their connections, their context and their relationships – making information meaningful, entertaining and beautiful. This is information like you have never seen it before – keeping text to a minimum and using unique visuals that offer a blueprint of modern life – through colour illustrations that are tactile  and easy to flick through but intriguing and engaging enough to study for hours.

Well, I’m a sucker for information of all kinds so I was really looking forward to this. I must say, after an initial bout of great enthusiasm, I found it less and less impressive as I delved further into it. The first two editions were apparently full of mistakes, and the odd one remains. But whilst it would be nice to have information presented in a beautiful but stimulating way, it often fails to achieve just that object and is either unreadable, unclear or plain over-the-top. Great to dip into, but nowhere near as good as ‘The Atlas of The Real World’ by Thames and Hudson which is absolutely terrific.