Darwin
Top topiary: the year’s best gardening books
There are probably no more gifted professional gardeners in England than Jim Buckland and Sarah Wain, husband and wife and…
Treat in store: Unsheltered, by Barbara Kingsolver, reviewed
In a living room in Vineland, New Jersey, in the 1870s, a botanist and entomologist named Mary Treat studied the…
Cathedral of creation
Sometimes, it pays to rediscover what’s already under your nose. I’ve been umpteen times to the Natural History Museum but…
Diary
Diana Spencer has been dead for 20 years. I was a journalist on the Evening Standard in those days and…
Science was invented in 1572
There was no science before 1572, the year that Tycho Brahe saw a new star in the night sky above…
The best things in the world have always sprung up by accident. Take the internet, for instance
Since no one has bothered to ask what my must-read book of last year was I’m going to tell you…
Green is the colour of happiness
According to this wonderfully thought-provoking book, human attachment to plants was much more evident in the 19th century than it…
Clash of the titans
This is an odd book: interesting, informative, intelligent, but still decidedly odd. It is a history of the Victorian era…
E.O. Wilson has a new explanation for consciousness, art & religion. Is it credible?
His publishers describe this ‘ground-breaking book on evolution’ by ‘the most celebrated living heir to Darwin’ as ‘the summa work…
