Books

What do we really need in order to live a happy life? An Epicurean antidote to anxiety. Over two thousand years ago the Greek philosopher Epicurus ...

The only numbers in this book are the page numbers. The three main branches of abstract math - topology, analysis, and algebra - turn out to be sur...

When critics attacked Andy Warhol's Marilyn paintings as shallow, the Pop artist was happy to present himself as shallower still: He claimed that h...

In Fundamentals, Nobel laureate Frank Wilczek offers the reader a simple yet profound exploration of reality based on the deep revelations of moder...

Other species adapt to their environments; we alone create ours. Over generations, we have remade the world to suit ourselves - using improved know...

The material world is itself emptiness.Emptiness is itself the material world. Powerful, mystical and concise, the Heart Sutra is believed to conta...

Why can humans alone invent? In this book, psychologist and world renowned autism expert Simon Baron-Cohen puts forward a bold new theory: because ...

The Enlightenment is one of the formative periods of Western history, yet more than 300 years after it began, it remains controversial. It is often...

The end of Europe's empires has so often been seen as a story of high politics and warfare. In Tim Harper's remarkable new book the narrative is ve...

In this collection of writings, the logbook of an intelligence always on the move, Carlo Rovelli follows his curiosity and invites us on a voyage t...

Beneath the panic and bluster, beneath the confusing speeches and the conflicting advice, the Coronavirus pandemic acted, changing our world in the...

There is no real evidence that humans ever 'domesticated' cats. Rather, it seems that at some point cats saw the potential value to themselves of h...

The idea that nothing happens by chance in history, that nothing is quite what it seems to be at first sight, that everything is the result of the ...

Steam power transformed our world, initiating the complex, resource-devouring industrial system the consequences of which we live with today. It re...

Lenin once said, "There are decades when nothing happens and weeks when decades happen." This is one of those times when history has sped up. CNN h...

They know something you don't know. They work inside investment banks, betting companies and social media giants. What are the secrets held by math...

The vivid and entertaining portraits in Chris Harding's enormously enjoyable new book take the reader from the earliest written accounts of Japan r...

These are dangerous times for democracy. We live in an age of winners and losers, where the odds are stacked in favour of the already fortunate. St...

Do you identify yourself by your profession, rather than your family? Do you consider yourself unique? Do you have personal goals? If so, perhaps y...

The assassination of Thomas Becket in Canterbury Cathedral on 29 December 1170 is one of the most famous events in European history. It inspired th...

Beyond race or class, our lives are defined by a powerful, unspoken system of divisions. In Caste, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Isabel Wilkerson g...

Mars - bewilderingly empty, coated in red dust - is an unlikely place to pin our hopes of finding life elsewhere. And yet, right now multiple space...

We know the universe had a beginning. But what happens at the end of the story? With lively wit and wry humour, astrophysicist Katie Mack takes us ...

Throughout history, successful societies have created institutions which channel both competition and co-operation to achieve complex goals of gene...

Rivers, more than any road, technology or political event, have shaped the course of civilization. Rivers have opened frontiers, defined borders, s...

In the years just before and after the fall of the Berlin Wall, people from across the political spectrum in Europe and America celebrated a great ...

Why does a bad impression last longer than a good one? Why does losing money affect us more than gaining it? What makes phobias so hard to shake? T...

From modest origins, the Habsburgs grew in power to gain control of the Holy Roman Empire in the fifteenth century. Then, in just a few decades, th...

Coffee is one of the most valuable commodities in the history of the global economy and the world's most popular drug. The very word 'coffee' is on...

Today, the bunker has become the extreme expression of our greatest fears: from pandemics to climate change and nuclear war. And once you look, it ...

At home and in government, contemporary America finds itself riven by a culture war in which aggression and defensiveness alike are on the rise. It...

In space the sun rises and sets 16 times a day. You fly over every sea, every mountain and desert, every city and every port. The most ordinary thi...

Today many of us live indoor lives, disconnected from the natural world as never before. And yet nature remains deeply ingrained in our language, c...

In August 2018 a fifteen-year-old Swedish girl, Greta Thunberg, decided not to go to school one day. A year later, she was joined in her strike by ...

Humans are the most successful species on Earth; a planet-altering force of nature. Meanwhile, our closest living relatives, the now-endangered chi...

The complexity of mathematics - its abstract rules and obscure symbols - can seem very distant from the everyday. There are those things that are r...