"Phillips wishes to have it both ways: to enjoy the gravitas conferred upon him by psychoanalytic credentials and to bounce like a literary critic; to be both the eldest and the youngest child … it is all so elegant, so intelligent, that to point this out is to call the emperor naked." Talitha Stevenson in the New Statesman was sceptical about Adam Phillips's Missing Out: In Praise of the Unlived Life – "Sometimes euphony is just plain phony." Laurence Scott in the Financial Times didn't go quite as far, but did argue that "Phillips, after all, is arguing for the merits of frustration and his prose tests our trained appetite for easy comprehension"; the "writing occasionally has a Lewis Carroll quality, as though the smoking caterpillar has taken a genuine interest in our psychic wellbeing". The Daily Telegraph's Rowland Manthorpe, however, was much taken with the idea that "real-life gratification is never as perfect as the satisfactions we imagine … Always humane, never reductive, Phillips is one of those writers whom it is a pleasure simply to hear think".

There was much praise for John Banville's Ancient Light, in which the ageing actor Alexander Cleave remembers his affair, aged 15, with his best friend's mother. According to Patricia Craig in the Independent, many of Banville's "customary concerns are present in this bedazzling new novel: memory and invention, questions of identity and make-believe, names and aliases, transgressions and transformations … What the illicit pair get up to is evoked half lyrically, half comically, and with all the grace and aplomb we expect from this author." For Jake Kerridge in the Sunday Express, "Banville's prose, as gorgeous and precise as in his 2005 Man Booker winner The Sea, evokes scenes so that they burn in the reader's mind as brightly as they do in Cleave's memory … Banville proves here over and over that one can write with the true texture of erotic memory without resorting to titillation. He deserves to outsell Fifty Shades of Grey tenfold." The Sunday Times's Adam Lively came to a more guarded conclusion: "Sometimes it can be the lumpy and misbegotten, not the elegantly finished, that ends up lingering longest in the mind. Ancient Light has exactly that deeply creative, resonant unevenness."

Rowan Williams, reviewing How Much Is Enough by Edward and Robert Skidelsky in Prospect magazine, paid tribute to a "crisp and pungent" study: "The Skidelskys are prescient in stressing that a focus on happiness as a goal in itself is completely inimical to any practice that involves clear and compassionate self-knowledge"; and their "final chapter offers some bold and lucid proposals about what the state can do to rein in the fever of reductive economism and toxic acquisitiveness". The Tory press was predictably less enthusiastic. Alasdair Palmer in the Sunday Telegraph felt that their "vision of what we should do to achieve the good life and society ends up sounding distinctly unappetising … the Skidelskys are right that we do not need most of the goods that we amass. But we do need to be diverted from a sense of meaninglessness. Struggling to get richer and competing for status usually does that more effectively than contemplating ultimate values." Dominic Lawson in the Sunday Times was unimpressed "by Skidelsky and Son sermonising to the effect that we as a society are, uniquely in history, completely tyrannised by acquisitiveness … we have children and grandchildren and we want to provide for them into the distant future, as well. In that sense, the desire to make a lot of money can actually be connected to real love."