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.

A fiercely witty polemic . . . Amusing, erudite, insightful * Daily Mail *
Witty, astringent primer for life . . . Bayley is a dazzling writer, by turns elegant, iconoclastic and wickedly subversive, and with a style and panache that rivals his favourite household objects -- Michael Simkins * Mail on Sunday *
The joy (and depth) of this book is how Bayley has come to appreciate the spiritual value of things big and small -- Roger Lewis * Telegraph *

In the 1970s, Terence Conran plucked Stephen Bayley from the obscurity of provincial academe to do his good works. One result was The Boilerhouse Project, promoting design in London's V&A, which became the most successful gallery of the eighties. Another result was the influential Design Museum. Stephen has since become one of the world's best-known commentators on design and popular culture.