Clumsy and heavy, Goliath never stood a chance

When we think of David and Goliath, we think of a young man, not very big, who has a fight with a terrifying opponent, and wins. We think of David as puny and Goliath as towering and strong — not to mention heavily armed. We see David’s victory as something that happened against all odds. The story of David and Goliath is, as Malcolm Gladwell puts it, ‘a metaphor for improbable victory’. Well, that’s how we think about it, anyway. But the thing is, apparently, we’ve got it all wrong.

Gladwell, one of the most influential non-fiction writers in the world, often asks his reader to take a closer look at things. In The Tipping Point, his subject was epidemics. If you study epidemics, he showed us, you can gain insight into lots of other things — like, say, the American Revolution, or the behaviour of consumers. In his next book, Blink, he explained human intuition — how it can work brilliantly, and how it sometimes fails.