Changing my mind : occasional essays

How did George Eliot's love life affect her prose? Why did Kafka write at three in the morning? In what ways is Barack Obama like Eliza Doolittle? Can you be over-dressed for the Oscars? What is Italian Feminism? If Roland Barthes killed the Author, can Nabokov revive him?

What does 'soulful' mean? Is "Date Movie" the worst film ever made? Split into five sections - 'Reading', 'Being', 'Seeing', 'Feeling' and 'Remembering' - "Changing My Mind" finds Zadie Smith casting an acute eye over material both personal and cultural.

This engaging collection of essays - some published here for the first time - reveals Smith as a passionate and precise essayist, equally at home in the world of great books and bad movies, family and philosophy, British comedians and Italian divas.

Whether writing of Obama, Katherine Hepburn, Kafka, Anna Magnani or David Foster Wallace, she brings a practitioner's care to the art of criticism, with a style as sympathetic as it is insightful. "Changing My Mind" is journalism at its most expansive, intelligent and funny - a gift to readers and writers both.

Within its covers an essay is more than a column of opinions: it's a space in which to think freely.