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.
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
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.
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
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
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.
A sumptuous volume on the so-called father of English geology, replete with Smith's own remarkable hand-coloured maps, stratigraphies, Sowerby's fossil illustrations, and photographs. Very l... read more
Johann Doppelmayr published his Atlas Coelestis in 1742: here it is again, with all its plates and notes, with an excellent explanatory text. Comets, planets, moons, stars - this is a wonder... read more
This two-volume masterpiece by the author of The Master and His Emissary is a long conversation between neuropsychology and philosophy, science and poetry, the two sides of our brains. Truly... read more