If you do your shopping in London this Christmas, you’ll be wished the compliments of the season via the Oxford Street fairylights. Happy Christmas… from Bird’s-Eye, you’ll be told: season’s greetings and buy our products, all in one. But don’t complain. These days, with a war underway, unprecedented restrictions to civil liberties en route, and a massive global recession (and anthrax!) in the post, our own tricksy love-to-hate-to-love relationship with branding and consumer culture is the least of our problems.

And, at some level, at the very root of them. Called “the Bible of anticorporate militancy” by (the now-defunct) Select magazine, written before “The Battle of Seattle”, gone round the world largely via word of mouth like a benevolent computer virus, the book No Logo has turned journalist, activist and lecturer Naomi Klein into a kind of unwilling celebrity spokesperson for the antiglobalisation movement.

The fact that the messenger is a well-spoken, telegenic 31-year-old Canadian woman (whose conversation, like her writing, is as peppered with pop-culture references and youthful colloquialisms as it is with hard cold socioeconomic facts) and not a crusty anarchophile or a dogmatic hyperliberal, is probably a significant reason, among many – not even counting September 11th – that 2001 has been the year that the anti-globalisation movement became, finally, unignorable.