Book review: The finger

The Fingerby Angus Trumble (Yale, £18.99) ***

This 'handbook' of the finger opens with a pre-emptive reference to George Eliot's Casaubon – that way at least the reader can't claim to have got there first. Trumble has clearly assembled quite a card-index, collecting finger-associated imagery and ideas from ancient mythology to modern mathematics and from art to law-enforcement, showing myriad different ways in which the finger can be indicatory, expressive – and of course obscene. But his book is a challenge for those of us who assume that learning is always and inherently worthwhile.