Anonymity
By John Mullan
Faber £17.99, 224 pages
FT bookshop price: £14.39

John Locke’s Two Treatises of Government is said to have had a less appealing working title – “Tractatus De Morbo Gallico” (A Study of Syphilis). Disguising his revolutionary tract in this way would have allowed Locke to make his point with humour – in Stuart England, after all, venereal disease and absolutism were both considered uniquely French afflictions.