Andrew Martin is surprisingly well qualified to write a housework guide for men. Not only is he a man himself, but he does a lot around the house. On purely humanitarian grounds he recently took over some of the ironing from his wife; he then branched out into cleaning the bathroom, fairly regular vacuuming, and doing the dishes after dinner (when he wasn’t going out). For the purposes of this book, Martin has interviewed many experts, and can thus provide answers to such burning questions as: Do I need to bother about the controls on the iron? Is dust actually dangerous? What’s all this stuff about hard and soft water? The result is a genuinely enlightening read, combining practical housework advice with touching recollections from the author’s Yorkshire childhood and hilarious scenes from the daily sit-com of family life. How to Get Things Really Flat will amuse and instruct any slobbish man forced at gunpoint to read it.