Home tweet home: how an illustrator captured the intricacy of bird nests
When Susan Ogilvy starting painting nests in her garden she realised there were few pictorial accounts of these complex creationsOne day about five years ago, while she was clearing up her Somerset...
View ArticleIn brief: Lemon; The Nutmeg’s Curse; Dirt – reviews
Kwon Yeo-Sun brings eerie beauty to crime fiction, Amitav Ghosh traces the climate crisis to colonialism and Bill Buford goes to the heart of French cuisineKwon Yeo-Sun (translated by Janet...
View ArticleShould scientists run the country?
Covid has put academics like Chris Whitty and Patrick Vallance at the heart of government, but smart politicians are essential tooHow many lives would have been saved in the pandemic if the UK...
View ArticleTop 10 books about human consciousness | Charles Foster
Authors from Carl Jung to Aldous Huxley and Susan Blackmore explore the deep mysteries of what it means to be a personDo you know what sort of animal you are? It’s rather important to know. If you call...
View ArticleCovid by Numbers review – how to make sense of the statistics
David Spiegelhalter and Anthony Masters delve into the detail behind the data and explore the true human cost of the pandemicAlong with successive waves of infection, the coronavirus pandemic has...
View ArticleGeoengineering by Gernot Wagner review – a stark warning
Spraying aerosols into the atmosphere may be fraught with risk, but to dismiss it out of hand is irresponsible, a climate scientist arguesGernot Wagner has spent a large part of his life thinking about...
View ArticleRationality by Steven Pinker review – it all stands to reason
The cognitive psychologist makes perfect sense in his defence of rational thinking and why our brains often lead us astrayWhether in primitive tribes or the most technologically advanced 21st-century...
View ArticleRationality by Steven Pinker review – reason and beyond
Our powers of reason have undoubtedly made the world a better place. So why are we so in thrall to fake news? ‘Rationality ought to be the lodestar of everything we think or do.” This is the opening...
View ArticleHot Air by Peter Stott review – the battle against climate change denial
A personal account of one climate scientist’s struggle to promote facts in the face of contrarian prejudiceHow on earth did we get here? How did we arrive in a world where temperatures in British...
View ArticleThe Man from the Future by Ananyo Bhattacharya review – the life of John von...
An expert on everything from game theory to Byzantine history, the inspiration for Dr Strangelove was as brilliant as he was dangerous“A quaint and ceremonious village of puny demigods on stilts,”...
View ArticleBaillie Gifford prize reveals ‘outstanding storytelling’ on 2021 shortlist
With subjects ranging from postwar Germany to the fall of Robert Maxwell and the Sackler family, judges praise ‘exciting and invigorating’ finalistsThe shortlist for the Baillie Gifford prize for...
View ArticleIn brief: The Importance of Being Interested; Small Things Like These;...
Robin Ince in conversation with scientists, a brave Irish novella from Claire Keegan, and Sathnam Sanghera’s extraordinary exploration of empireRobin InceAtlantic, £17.99, pp400Continue reading...
View ArticleThe Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity by David Graeber and David...
This imaginative attempt to reconfigure humanity’s roots contends that early people were free to shape their own livesIn the wake of bestselling blockbusters such as Jared Diamond’s Collapse and Yuval...
View ArticleAnimal Vegetable Criminal by Mary Roach review – when the natural world...
We complain when wildlife intrudes into human spaces – but who are the real interlopers?A few years ago my wife and I woke in the middle of the night to the sound of rustling: mice had broken into our...
View ArticleSaving Us by Katharine Hayhoe review – across the climate crisis divide
A scientist and gifted speaker makes a convincing case for calm, informed discussions in the race to avert catastropheIt’s not an exaggeration to say that Saving Us: A Climate Scientist’s Case for Hope...
View ArticleThe Secret of Life by Howard Markel review – science and misogyny
A cinematic account of toxic masculinity among 1950s DNA researchers – and a celebration of scientist Rosalind FranklinThe first page of Howard Markel’s comprehensive history The Secret of Life reads...
View ArticleThe Wordhord: Daily Life in Old English – a lexical treasure chest
This compendium of words and scholarly asides paints a colourful portrait of the Anglo-Saxon worldEnglish has always been a language of immigrants. Even before the Norman conquest, much lamented by...
View ArticleIslands of Abandonment by Cal Flyn audiobook review – post-human landscapes
From Chernobyl to remote Scotland, Flyn brings to life areas that have been abandoned by people and recolonised by nature, plus the rest of the week’s picksA vivid reflection on the “post-human...
View ArticleThe Book of Emotions review – how does it feel?
Editor Edgar Gerrard Hughes’s volume of quizzes, ideas, tests and tricks is an amusing – and sometimes alarming – diversionThere is a sense in which we are all books of emotions: we flip through our...
View ArticleViral by Alina Chan and Matt Ridley review – was Covid-19 really made in China?
Two champions of ‘rigorous science’ fail to provide a shred of evidence that Covid-19 was engineered and leaked from a labEver since the first reports of a coronavirus outbreak in Wuhan, a megacity in...
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