This review puts me in a dilemma. How honest should I be? Let me explain. I first came across Andrew P Sykes in the summer of 2015 while he was blogging his bike ride from Tarifa, at the southern tip … Continue reading →
“A wonderful, gritty expedition book”, writes Chris Bonington on the cover of Andrew Greig’s “Summit Fever”. Much as I like that book I don’t agree with Sir Chris’s use of ‘gritty’ to describe it. But “Walking the Amazon” is a wonderful, gritty … Continue reading →
This neat little book by freelance Oxford historian Liz Woolley picks out a couple of dozen of Oxford’s Victorian and Edwardian industrial and commercial buildings, many of which still survive today. If you didn’t know where four of the city’s … Continue reading →
This is a moderately heavyweight and academic account of the development of news media in Europe over the 15th to 18th centuries, but it is not dry or sterile. It describes the changes in spoken, written and printed transmission of … Continue reading →
This book tells the story of five young British artists over the decade leading up to and through the first world war. All of them – Stanley Spencer, Paul Nash, Mark Gertler, Richard Nevinson and Dora Carrington – studied at … Continue reading →
Randall Munroe is the creator of the web comic xkcd.com, home of all geeks sufficiently socialised to have a sense of humour. In this book he applies rigorous* logic to analyse the often weird questions people ask him. Questions like … Continue reading →
Jim Al-Khalili and Johnjoe McFadden explore the role quantum weirdness might play in many processes in living organisms – avian navigation, the sense of smell, photosynthesis and more. The scientific evidence is growing, although as they themselves acknowledge their conclusions … Continue reading →
It’s probably a safe bet that not many people outside the USA have heard of John Wesley Powell, but he and a motley assortment of backwoodsmen and adventurers made one of the great exploration journeys that helped open up the … Continue reading →
This is classic David Deutsch. He is a radical realist: there is a real world out there, we can know about it, and there is no limit to our ever-increasing knowledge. He has no time for doubters and in his … Continue reading →
It’s not a casual coincidence that The Simpsons contains some quite geeky maths stuff – several of the writers are mathematicians and they’re well up to sneaking in mathematical references and jokes. Whether in the main story or in freeze-frame … Continue reading →