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I have to say... I get why Shakespeare is the one who's most remembered today.

Not that there's not brilliant bits in here. Any time the plot takes a pause from pranks and commentary on 16th century politics and focuses on Faustus and Mephistopheles is often sublime, and the humour occasionally works too - this bit really cracked me up, from where Faustus first summons the devil:

FAUSTUS: Sint mihi Dei Acherontis propitii! Valeat numen triplex Jehovae! Ignei, aerii, aquatani spiritus, salvete! Orientis princeps Belzebub, inferni ardentis monarcha, et Demogorgon, propitiamus vos, ut appareat et surgat Mephistophilis. Quid tu moraris? per Jehovam, Gehennam et consecratum aquam quam nunc spargo, signumque crucis quod nunc facio, et per vota nostra, ipse nunc surgat nobis dicatus Mephistophilis!

Enter MEPHISTOPHELES in the shape of a DRAGON

FAUSTUS: I charge thee to return and change thy shape...

Can't you just hear the "Gulp" there?

But it's still all so... linear. Faustus sells his soul to the devil despite everyone telling him exactly what's going to happen, spends 24 years using his powers for silly pranks like stealing the pope's food, and then gets dragged off to hell just like everyone told him he would be. Have to say I prefer Goethe's take on the story.

It's an interesting topic: what is beauty? It might seem like a trivial question, but think about it: esthetics run through everything we do. Everything we read, watch, listen to, right down to the houses we live in, the cars we drive, the cans we buy food in are made to correspond to some standard of beauty. Where does all that come from? What makes us think a Rolls looks better than a Datsun? What makes Dickens a better writer than Stephenie Meyer? Why did medieaval Christ figures look triumphant and baroque ones suffering? Why is Kate Moss a supermodel and Roseanne Barr not? Can something tragic be beautiful?

If you've read Eco before you know he's good at picking up patterns, memes, ideas and how they mutate with time and context. So this is Eco the non-fiction writer tracing society's concept of beauty from pre-historic time to the 21st century, richly illustrated with artworks and architecture and quotes from poets, philosophers and novelists ranging from Plato to Wilde. Venus of Willendorf and Naomi Campbell, Apollo and George Clooney, Warhol and Tizian, Thomas Aquinus and Kafka, they're all in here. Inevitably, even at 400 pages, it becomes a bit of a coffee table book; it's a huge topic, and he doesn't really have time to cover everything (plus, it's all pretty Eurocentric, of course). But being Eco, what he does cover is covered in-depth, giving you a great understanding of how and why standards change and how they relate to changes in the world - the relationships between religion and art, between revolution and poetry, technology and design. Rather brilliant.

Plus, obviously, the book itself is beautiful.

Now I'm even more intrigued by the sequel On Ugliness; Eco has said that after writing the first book, he realised he'd been writing about standards, about conformity. What about the things that don't conform to the traditional standards? That's another doorstopper.

Currywurst is one of those weird results of the post-war era: the most teutonic of foods, the sausage, fried up in Indian curry (or rather a European version of it). As Timm puts it, it's the sort of food that could only be a hit in a country where grey must occasionally be offset by splats of red. It started turning up in hot dog stands in the 50s and became a staple of German fast food. Trying to pinpoint exactly when and by whom it was invented is like trying to decide who invented the hamburger or the kebab; it's always been there.

Except Timm (or rather his narrator) remembers eating it in Hamburg in the years directly after the war, as a kid picking through bombed-out houses and abandoned defense posts, and claims to know exactly who invented it. And so one day in the 1990s, he looks up the woman who used to run the local hot dog stand back then and asks her how she came to invent the recipe. She's old, pushing 90, and blind, but remembers him. You want to know how I invented curried sausage? It's a long story. It started in 1945, when I was 40, hadn't seen my husband since he joined the army 6 years earlier, and ran into this young sailor during an air raid who really didn't want to be crushed under a tank the next day...

The Invention Of Curried Sausage takes place during the last days of the war and the weeks after, as the British army crosses the river and the citizens of Hamburg are ordered by to fight to the last drop to turn around a war that's obviously already been lost, while Hitler blows his brains out in his bunker in Berlin. But that's not the focus. It's the story of one woman and one (much younger) man who cling to each other as everything falls apart around them - a love story that isn't one, since they're far too different, pushed together by circumstances that won't last, and lying their asses off to stave off the inevitable end. It's a simple story, but told so subtly and with so many little details that it captures so much more; the paranoia of living in a fascist dictatorship, the desperation of defeat, the realisation that you've been on the wrong side, the role of women in a society built on the idea of strength... all that, sure. But also the very nature of human interaction, trust, distrust, hope, despair, hunger. It's not pretty, it pretty much can't be under those circumstances. It's the sort of novel - short, greasy, and yet perfectly spiced - that belongs under a grey rainy sky in the shadow of quickly built concrete houses, with a plate of warm sausage in curry sauce.