It is often supposed that Lovelock was a sort of hippie, but he worked for NASA in the 1960s, then MI5 and MI6; then Shell, whom he warned about the danger to the environment of fossil fuels... read more
We did a podcast with the brilliant Clare for his previous book, Heavy Light. Here, he moves further from his own experience to look at how the system could work better. He is a joy to read.
An exceptional examination of the ways to fight global warming, by a professor of earth science at Stanford University, sharp enough to dispel the paralysis of climate apathy.
VM was the author of The Map of Knowledge, a compelling account of the survival of the ancient classics in the Muslim world, and their re-emergence in the West. Now she turns her attention t... read more
Freud is the primary focus here, but we also encounter Klimt, Schiele, Herzl, Empress Sisi and many others in this fine account of the new understanding of the mind that arose from Vienna at... read more
Brilliant detective work by this French paleoanthropologist, who has studied Neanderthal traces from the Arctic to the Mediterranean and argues that their intelligence was different from our... read more
A grand tour of the 'big five' wipe-outs in history, with names such as 'the Carnian Pluvial Event' and 'the Great Dying'. These are tough days at the office of nomenclature.
Henderson lends an ear to the world around him, to both the audible and the inaudible... the rustling of the Northern Lights, the sound of desert sands, the subterranean boom of a volcano...... read more
A literary inquiry into the peculiar intimacy of infections, the slippery relationship between ourselves and foreign bodies. Who knew that something called 'the poetics of infection' could e... read more
From the late, great environmentalist, an illustrated anthology of essays by a brigade of quantum physicists, biologists, neuroscientists, etc. Like Tim Marshall's Prisoners of Geography, th... read more
A hotter, drier earth means a dustier earth. Owens frames these microparticles as the insidious biproduct of industrialism, whose immense repercussions will be felt ever more powerfully in ... read more
A vision of cosmic carnage from the astromagician. This time he squeezes into the eye of a black hole, slips beyond its horizon and then on into the dense, dense darkness where time and spac... read more
Erudition and curiosity impel this vivid, detailed portrait by the world's foremost expert on Linnaeus: this biography won several prizes when it was first published in Sweden in 2019.
Inspired by Darwin and von Humboldt, ARW travelled to the Amazon Basin and the Malay Archipelago. He published a paper on natural selection in 1858, a year before Darwin's Origin of Species... read more
On the radical pre-Socratic philosopher and geometer who proposed (amongst other things) an early theory of evolution. By the author of Seven Brief Lessons on Physics and Helgoland.
Beautifully designed and illustrated, large format. Informative and somewhat interactive; enlivens the imagination. The planets, asteroids, comets... For ages 8-11.