Darwin

A river of green topiary cascades down the terrace steps at West Dean. Cotoneaster horizontalis covers the wall on the right

Top topiary: the year’s best gardening books

17 November 2018 9:00 am

There are probably no more gifted professional gardeners in England than Jim Buckland and Sarah Wain, husband and wife and…

Barbara Kingsolver. Credit David Wood

Treat in store: Unsheltered, by Barbara Kingsolver, reviewed

3 November 2018 9:00 am

In a living room in Vineland, New Jersey, in the 1870s, a botanist and entomologist named Mary Treat studied the…

Hope, the blue whale, replaces Dippy, the diplodocus, in the Natural History Museum’s Hintze Hall

Cathedral of creation

12 August 2017 9:00 am

Sometimes, it pays to rediscover what’s already under your nose. I’ve been umpteen times to the Natural History Museum but…

Diary

5 August 2017 9:00 am

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

16 January 2016 9:00 am

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

2 January 2016 9:00 am

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

17 October 2015 8:00 am

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

26 October 2013 9:00 am

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?

7 September 2013 9:00 am

His publishers describe this ‘ground-breaking book on evolution’ by ‘the most celebrated living heir to Darwin’ as ‘the summa work…