Cédric Villani: ‘Mathematics is about progress and adventure and emotion’
Fields medal winner Cédric Villani is an impassioned advocate for mathematics, as Carole Cadwalladr discoversThe second time I meet Cédric Villani is when I bump into him in the Eurostar terminal in...
View ArticleLandmarks review – Robert Macfarlane finds poetry in the peatlands
This joyous meditation on land and language is a love letter to the British Isles“When we try to pluck out anything by itself, we find it hitched to the whole world,” wrote the great Scottish...
View ArticleWellcome book prize shortlist mixes grief and joy
Brain surgery, death and anxiety among the subjects explored, but chair of judges Bill Bryson says the books are ‘mostly positive’Brain surgery, death, cruelty, anxiety and grief are all explored in...
View ArticleWhy the science manuscript must also have literary merit
Quoting poetry in a science paper does not add to its research, but as the Wellcome Trust book prize reveals, our dry format benefits from well-written ways to gain wider readershipThe manuscript is...
View ArticleStella prize 2015 shortlist: three debut fiction authors nominated
Maxine Beneba Clarke, Emily Bitto and Ellen Van Neerven named on six-strong list for Australia’s leading literary award for women writersThree debut authors have made the shortlist for the 2015 Stella...
View ArticleNew books party: books that arrived recently | @GrrlScientist
This week’s books include three scholarly works: one examines the language of science and how it changed from Latin to English; another probes the rise of online universities; and a third discusses the...
View ArticleBoundless by Kathleen Winter review – in the footsteps of John Franklin
A journey to the Northwest Passage inspires banal meditations on … whatever comes to mindOver the last 20 years nature writing has enjoyed a huge resurgence, taking over where travel writing left off....
View ArticleTo Explain the World: The Discovery of Modern Science by Steven Weinberg –...
Aristotle is tedious, Descartes is overrated – a Nobel prizewinner’s Whig history of scienceThe ancient Greeks of Miletus looked for the underlying reality. Thales reportedly thought the world was made...
View ArticleThe Birth of the Pill by Jonathan Eig review – sex, drugs and population control
From the free-love firebrand who bewitched HG Wells to the boldest field trial in history – via a murky eugenics subplot – here’s a racy, readable account of the discovery that changed society for...
View ArticleCuckoo review – combining science with infectious enthusiasm
Nick Davies has spent a lifetime studying this most infamous of birds, and he supplies history and science of the highest orderThe incessant, two-note call of the cuckoo, insinuating its way into the...
View ArticleThe 10 best nature books
We celebrate the arrival of spring with a selection of the best nature writingTim Dee is the author of Four Fields and The Running Sky. He is currently writing a book about spring Moby DickHerman...
View ArticleNew books party: books that arrived recently | @GrrlScientist
This week, I share my thoughts about a travel-adventure story about a quest to see one of the world’s last surviving “unicorns” (the saola); a paperback about the natural history of Ebola and a second...
View ArticleFreedom Regained by Julian Baggini review – the question of free will
Men and women aren’t sole authors of themselves, but neither are they slaves, as some theorists argue, to neural firings and inherited genesTwo or three centuries ago, most of the common people of...
View ArticleSteven Weinberg: the 13 best science books for the general reader
The Nobel laureate on making science accessible – from Ptolemy to Darwin to DawkinsIf you had a chance to ask Aristotle what he thought of the idea of writing about physical science for general...
View ArticleThe Shepherd’s Life: A Tale of the Lake District by James Rebanks – review
A pitch-perfect and profound account of life as a sheep farmer in which the work dominates, from clipping to cullingIt is not easy to imagine an account of a life more observant and precisely detailed...
View ArticleNicholas Lezard’s paperback of the week: Alex Through the Looking Glass by...
Cast aside your arithmophobia – this is the kind of book that will make even the least mathematically minded reader understand the mindblowing, reality-altering beauty of numbersI imagine that there...
View ArticleCoastlines: The Story of Our Shore by Patrick Barkham review – a tour of the...
A journey around the British coast reveals the effects of world war, work and art on a fragile, ever-changing environmentOh, we do like to be beside the seaside. Why is that? Because we evolved from...
View ArticleIsland Biogeography Revisited: an online experiment | @GrrlScientist
As an experiment in online book reading clubs, I will share a series of pieces about a group of scientists that is reading and discussing the book, Island Biogeography Revisited -- are you willing to...
View ArticleNew Books Party: books that arrived recently | @GrrlScientist
This week’s books include a biochemist’s reasoning that protons are the fundamental reason that life evolved in the way it did; a botanist’s assertion that plants are intelligent beings; and an...
View ArticleAn Astronaut’s Guide to Life on Earth by Chris Hadfield – refreshingly...
Astronaut Chris Hadfield – famous for his zero-G rendition of Space Oddity aboard the ISS – gives us a personable, very unstarry account of how he made it into space“I wasn’t destined to be an...
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