Paraphernalia: The Curious Lives of Magical Things by Steven Connor Profile Books, 2011, 256 pages, £14.99 Paraphernalia, the latest offering by the cultural phenomenologist Steven Connor, the Birkbeck scholar who gave us a dermatological vision of the cosmos in magnificently distended detail in The Book of Skin (2004), has eighteen chapters, each dedicated to a single object. Here they are, in alphabetical order: bags, batteries, buttons, cards, combs, glasses, handkerchiefs, keys, knots, newspapers, pills, pins, pipes, plugs, rubber bands, sticky tape, sweets, wires. His brilliant extemporisations on the standard and non-standard uses of things familiar ought to acquire for their author the…