Since the industrial revolution, when everything ran by clockwork, people have understood how important it is to live in the moment. But over time our world has grown increasingly busy, and we've lost our ability to truly savour each unique experience and the simple pleasures the world has to offer.

Cultural commentator and critic Stephen Bayley seeks to explain what real value is: it's about taking the time and making the effort to appreciate things, of understanding the permanent charm of modest daily rituals performed with care and feeling. Of caring about appearances and meaning. Of being bold in matters of taste. Of fully understanding the source of lasting pleasure. Of making every encounter with an object or person meaningful.

Value is an elegiac account of what's recently been lost in the digital apocalypse. But also an enthusiastic anticipation of what we can regain in a post-viral, more analogue and more thoughtful world.

'Stephen Bayley is the English answer to Tom Wolfe, as suave, iconoclastic, witty, visually perceptive' Fiona MacCarthy

'He has the knack of getting ahead of everybody with values that turn out to be permanent' Clive James


'He has the attention span of an acid-crazed hummingbird hawkmoth, but when he craps, it glows' Sir Terence Conran

The joy (and depth) of this book is how Bayley has come to appreciate the spiritual value of things big and small