Steven Connor’s book The Madness of Knowledge: On Wisdom, Ignorance and Fantasies of Knowing is published by Reaktion on 11th March. The book is a psychopathology of intellectual life, which explores the emotional inner life of knowledge—the lusts, fantasies, dreams, and fears that the idea of knowing provokes. It includes discussions of the imperious will to know, of Freud’s epistemophilia (or love of knowledge), and the curiously insistent links between madness, magical thinking, and the desire for knowledge. It also explores the erotics of secrets and revelations, quizzes, quarreling and the history of ‘general knowledge’, imposture and stupidity. It ends with a discussion of the terrors of the coming epistemocracy.