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.
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
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
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 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.
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
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
A vision of cosmic carnage from this invigorating 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... 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
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