What Women Want by Maxine Mei-Fung Chung review – the depths of desire
The psychotherapist’s seven case studies show the role of longing in women’s lives and the two-way connection between analyst and patientSigmund Freud famously asked “What does a woman want?” and the...
View ArticleIn brief: The Meaning of Geese; Two Sherpas; The Second Cut – review
A magisterial diary for bird lovers, meditations on climbing, Shakespeare and colonialism, and a blackly comic Glasgow mysteryNick AchesonChelsea Green, £18.99, pp240Continue reading...
View ArticleIf Nietzsche Were a Narwhal by Justin Gregg review – the problem with human...
A researcher argues that animals understand how to live well better than their too-brainy counterpartsFriedrich Nietzsche claimed that humankind was “a fantastic animal that has to fulfil one more...
View ArticleFoolproof by Sander van der Linden review – how to defuse fake news
A Cambridge professor makes a fascinating case for counteracting the ‘misinformation virus’ through psychological inoculationCan you spot fake news? Here are the headlines of three recent stories that...
View ArticleAnaximander and the Nature of Science by Carlo Rovelli review – the ancient...
In Rovelli’s formative book, now published in English for the first time, he argues that a little-known Greek philosopher invented the idea of the cosmosSomething very startling happened in Miletus,...
View ArticleThe big idea: should robots take over fighting crime?
Could artificial intelligence offer a fairer and more efficient way of policing?San Francisco’s board of supervisors recently voted to let their police deploy robots equipped with lethal explosives –...
View ArticleCarlo Rovelli: ‘I tried to read Anna Karenina to my girlfriend before bed’
The theoretical physicist and author on boring his girlfriend with Tolstoy, the magic of Homer and making sense of WittgensteinMy earliest reading memoryI was a boy, maybe six or seven, stuck in bed...
View ArticleIn brief: What You Need from the Night; Elderflora; Tomorrow’s People – review
A haunting novel exploring a father-son relationship; a fascinating study of trees through history; and an illuminating analysis of demographicsLaurent Petitmangin (translated by Shaun...
View ArticleThe Earth Transformed by Peter Frankopan review – history through a different...
From volcanoes to man-made climate change, the author of Silk Roads shows how closely our environment shapes civilisationDo you have a personal eruption plan, if you don’t mind me asking? This is the...
View ArticleWomb: The Inside Story of Where We All Began by Leah Hazard review – the...
An eloquent, vigorous study by an NHS midwife speaks eloquently for the uterus, the organ on the frontline of the culture warsBy now, most organs have their own biography. Writers have advocated with...
View ArticleTen Birds That Changed the World by Stephen Moss review – on a wing and a prayer
A fascinating study of the fraught relationship between human beings and our feathered friendsTaking a numerical approach to the natural world – as in Simon Barnes’s History of the World in 100 Plants,...
View ArticleTen Birds That Changed the World by Stephen Moss review – our vexed...
From the guanay cormorant to the tree sparrow, the writer shows how consistently humans get birds wrongOn Saturday 13 December 1958, the People’s Republic of China declared war on a bird. Mobilisation...
View ArticleA Brief History of Time is ‘wrong’, Stephen Hawking told collaborator
Thomas Hertog worked with cosmologist on a new book after he shared his doubts about A Brief History of TimeIn 2002 Thomas Hertog received an email summoning him to the office of his mentor Stephen...
View ArticleTravellers to Unimaginable Lands by Dasha Kiper review – how dementia changes...
A clinical psychologist turns the spotlight on caregivers in this profoundly compassionate studyAn elegant woman enjoys a gin and tonic and dinner with her husband in a cosy Italian restaurant near...
View Article‘There I was, a tiny speck in a vast universe’ … How awe made my life worth...
I spent my adult life pushing away my sense of enchantment. Illness taught me how much I needed itFor the first two months of this year, I was ill. I don’t mean the kind of ill that you can soldier on...
View Article‘We’re in a golden age for microbes’: the man rewriting history from the...
Forget ‘great men’ – infection and disease are the really important forces in the development of humankind, believes public health specialist Jonathan Kennedy Barts pathology museum is usually open to...
View ArticleBeastly: A New History of Animals and Us by Keggie Carew review – the...
This heartfelt study of humanity’s centuries-long contempt for other life forms is a vital reminder of the damage we have wreakedPicture the scene. It’s 350BCE, and Aristotle – presumably looking a bit...
View ArticlePathogenesis by Jonathan Kennedy review – in sickness and in health
A fascinating account of how diseases have shaped humanity, from the neolithic to Covid-19The Covid-19 pandemic has wreaked extraordinary destruction and misery, killing nearly 7 million people...
View ArticleFive Times Faster by Simon Sharpe review – a radical but realistic path to...
A former civil servant makes a persuasive case for dropping economy-wide emissions targets and focusing on tipping points where green technologies become affordableLast month’s devastating report by...
View ArticleThe big idea: should doctors be able to prescribe psychedelics?
A move to allow Australian psychiatrists to treat depression with psilocybin may herald a new eraSo-called magic mushrooms (those that contain the molecule psilocybin) have been used by people around...
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