This book is a collection of rituals, accounts and reflections on how magick can invest any humdrum life with some new perspectives and, above all, fun.Although clearly not for everyone, unlike many books on the subject, this one's readable and the authors have a knack for the catchy phrase. Where earlier mages fixated on a neurotic obsession with the minutiae of demonic names and the exact times to invoke them, Levi argued that all this was merely a means of focusing the magician's own powers. The "chaos magick" of the title emerged in the late 1980s, when, like practically everything else, occultism was infected with the post-modernism bug. Jettisoning the cumbersome apparatus of traditional practice, and blending as many styles and belief systems as desired, chaos magick is about using your imagination and whatever is at hand in order to "engage with mystery". Devotees can find its origin in the work of the 19th-century French ex-Socialist-turned-Kabbalist Eliphas Levi, who boiled down the real machinery of magic to the will and imagination.

But if there are any serious objections to this work, as opposed to some dust-kicking about the title, then these will be historical. As I suspect Parks would be the first to admit, this is not history written to professorial standards. Whether that is a good thing or not is, of course, a matter of taste. For those who like to be gripped by the past Tim Parks has surpassed himself and produced a thoroughly readable book on the Medici. But for those wishing to enjoy history "in hexameter", this is Charles and Mary Lamb, not William Shakespeare Caveat emptor!.

If you think ritual magic is about drawing pentagrams in blood and sacrificing your neighbour's cat - if, that is, you think about it at all - this book will come as a surprise. Not too many books on magic - or magick, the authors' preferred spelling, which the notorious Aleister Crowley adopted to differentiate the true art from tawdry prestidigitation - boast of a ritual to "stop time" which involves baking cookies Or suggest making a talisman into a fridge magnet Or advise a game of Twister to set the mood. Or link Jean Luc Godard, Jacques Lacan and Buffy the Vampire Slayer to acquiring the Knowledge and Conversation of your Holy Guardian Angel. It's also true that not many envision the dark Hindu goddess Kali as P J Harvey wearing a T-shirt that says "lick my legs" or offer exercises to achieve multiple orgasms - male and female.