ALT A publicity advert for the talk featuring a photo of me on a green and purple background. Price is £6

ALT A light blue book cover with On Being Unreasonable at the top in bold black rounded writing and my name Kirsty Sedgman in yellow. At the bottom the subtitle in white says Why Being Bad Can Be a Force for Good, and in the middle there is a drawing of a cute white fluffy bunny looking furious and ripping up some yellow flowers with its paws.

ALT Photo of an article in the Guardian on the Best Ideas Books of 2023: Do you often find yourself dancing the “reasonable tango”? This is what the sociologist Kirsty Sedgman, in On Being Unreasonable (Faber), calls the kind of polite argument that acknowledges the opponent’s point with a “Yes, but …” and carries on indefinitely, with no mutual agreement in sight. In this bracing manifesto for being just a little less civilised, she considers subjects such as what should count as bad behaviour in the theatre, what “reasonable” means in law, and why we should not “debate” with fascists. (Sunlight is not the best disinfectant, she points out; bleach is.) Does being meek ever bring about justice? Is performative “reasonableness” really a cloak for the “terrifying thrill of self-righteousness”? The pious tone-policers, she argues, are Unreasonably Reasonable; we could all do with pulling down a few more statues and in general being a bit more Reasonably Unreasonable.