Guide to a male man

For all the many books written in the past 40 years about what it means to be a woman, there have been comparatively few about the nature of masculinity. Some might even feel that a studied contemplation of what it means to be a man is itself unmanly.

However, Tim Samuels, award-winning documentary maker and Men's Hour presenter on BBC Five Live, has no such hang-ups. He might look brooding and bearded on the inside cover of Who Stole My Spear? (Century, £12.99) - his investigation into the state of 21st-century maleness - but his writing is sensitive, funny and at times provocative.

This is, he feels, perhaps the most confusing time ever to be a man. We are walking around in bodies more or less identical to those of our hunter-gatherer forebears yet, instead of roaming the plains with eponymous spear in hand, we chaps are increasingly wielding nothing more lethal than a mouse in a hermetically sealed, air-conditioned office. And while traditional male virtues, such as strength, authority and daring, are still considered sexy - at least on dating sites - men are increasingly called upon to be right-brained, nappy-changing dads in touch with their emotions.

We are told to suppress the aggression and daring that stood us in good stead when confronting woolly mammoths but which are considered less useful in the world of chartered accountancy or website design. Some have adapted better than others. Around 95 per cent of CEOs of major companies are men, but so are 95 per cent of the prison population. And the leading cause of death in males under 45 is not illness or accident but suicide. Clearly a lot of men are not coping well with modern life.