Herbert Marcuse: An Aesthetics of Liberation by Malcolm Miles (Pluto Press, £22.95)
Can society be a work of art? So asked Herbert Marcuse, the cultural critic and subject of this admiring exposition. Marcuse studied with Heidegger, hung out at the Frankfurt Institute with Adorno and Horkheimer, worked for US intelligence during the second world war, became famous with his 1964 book One-Dimensional Man, and was treated, to his slight discomfort, as a guru of the late-1960s counterculture. Miles's analyses of his subject's writing on diverse artistic subjects  the German "artist novel", French resistance poetry, and the work of Samuel Beckett (to whom Marcuse wrote a touchingly grateful "fan letter" after Beckett sent him a poem for his 80th birthday)  are thoughtful and generously contextualised.

The author  who, as a Chelsea art student in the late 60s, "wore frilled and flower-patterned shirts and chiffon scarves"  suggests pointedly that Marcuse's thinking is still valuable in our own time of "precarity" and "a capitalism now obviously, wildly irrational". He displays, too, a winning diffidence: "I realise this is rather speculative," he apologises after one interesting thought, and ends the same chapter: "I am not sure if this matters, but it might." If only inferior writers were as humble.

The I Ching: A Biography by Richard J Smith (Princeton, £16.95)
Some 1960s hippies got into the I Ching as well as LSD; and Bob Dylan (whom Herbert Marcuse admired) described the book as "the only thing that is amazingly true, period". Smith's fascinating history of what he usually calls the Yijing  around 3,000 years old; first sanctioned by the Chinese state as a classic in 136 BCE  traces its influence on western artists such as Philip K Dick, Raymond Queneau, John Cage (who composed aleatory music with its help) and Jorge Luis Borges, as well as its enthusiastic reception by scientists (Leibniz saw in it his binary system confirmed), and its hermeneutic and political history in China itself. (Now, if you squint, the hexagrams look a bit like an oracular form of Tetris.)

Does the Yijing contain, as some scholars argue even today, an "algebra of the universe"? Its history does at least present the inspiring image of a golden age of academic freedom: "In imperial China it was not uncommon for a scholar to spend days or even weeks contemplating a single hexagram." That wouldn't look very good these days on your research impact statement.

The Body Language of Love by Allan & Barbara Pease (Orion, £6.99)
From cosmic numerology to the ambience of a cheesy 1970s nightclub: this book aims to teach online-dating singletons how to flirt in person. The female student must "give clear, unambiguous messages" to a suitor, such as "the head toss and hair flick", or "fondling a cylindrical object". (The authors suggest the stem of a glass; I say try a fire extinguisher.) Once the woman has got these strategies down pat ("Self-Touching" is another good one), she can recognise the signs of requited interest, such as "Protruding Thumbs", and "Crotch Display".

The authors attempt gamely to rebut any "politically correct" carpers who might feel there is a bit more to seduction than this, and advise men to eschew the goatee beard, since it "owes its origins to Satan". Instead, aspiring Lotharios should try "small-size Speedo swimming trunks or dangling the long end of a belt or a bunch of keys in front of their crotch". I tried both in a bar the other night and all it got me was escorted out.