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Peter Raby

'A fabulously rich, anecdotal and gripping account of those men and women who ventured out from Britain into the swamps and jungles of the tropics in search, knowingly or not, of the missing link. Through their stoical-sometimes crack-brained-voyages, the shape of the world, geographically and biologically, was elucidated. Never have more significant journeys been made. . . . Enthusiastic, informed and racy, this is one of the most invigorating accounts of the exploits of people from an age whose intrepidity is staggering. ' 'Peter Raby's book follows a disparate crew of botanists, scientists and collectors, who tried to order the earthly paradise which unfolded around them. Entrepreneurs they may have been - many were dependent on selling their specimens to finance their trips-but they were also scrupulous and sensitive observers. . . . Raby finds some shimmering, personalities. . . . His book is excellent. ' DAILY TELEGRAPH

Bright Paradise

Victorian Scientific Travellers

Roger Osborne

The Floating Egg begins with the search for an alchemist's secret, and ends with the re-imagination of a past world. Each chapter is connected to a particular corner of north-east England, and each explores the uncertain line where myth is dissolved into science, and belief gives way to knowledge. 
 
Different episodes show how the fall of Constantinople converted the common rock of the Yorkshire cliffs into a source of extraordinary wealth and power, and how this in turn uncovered the inhabitants of a succession of past worlds; how a stone falling from the sky near this same coast changed the minds of all the natural philosophers of Europe; and how a new science was born on the top of the tower of York Minster. We learn about the cloak-and-dagger world of fossil trading in the town of Whitby; and we see the entire life-work of a forgotten scientific genius who died from consumption at the age of twenty-five, having revolutionised his science. 
 
The stories move from documentary accounts to fictional recreations of historic events, from contemporary writing and illustrations to present-day reflection. By using different ways of describing the world of scientific endeavour, the author has produced a fascinating visually beautiful and highly entertaining book which allows us to witness the birth of a new science - the science of geology.

The Floating Egg

Episodes in the Making of Geology

E J M Bowlby

Separation, the second volume of Attachment and Loss, continues John Bowlby's influential work on the importance of the parental relationship to mental health. 
 
Here he considers separation and the anxiety that accompanies it: the fear of imminent or anticipated separation, the fear induced by parental threats of separation, and the inversion of the parent-child relationship. 
 
Dr Bowlby re-examines the situations that cause us to feel fear and compares them with evidence from animals. He concludes that fear is initially aroused by certain elemental situations - sudden movement, darkness or separation - which, although intrinsically harmless, are indicative of an increased risk of danger. 
 
Attachment and Loss is a deeply important series of works that continue to influence the landscape of psychoanalysis and psychology, and its second volume, Separation, provides a unique exploration of anxiety in the parent-child relationship.

Separation

Anxiety and anger: Attachment and loss Volume 2

Evan S Connell

Never has master storyteller Evan Connell been more enthralling than in these incandescent pages - tales of real-life adventure ranging from the archaeology of Olduvai gorge to the exploration of the Antarctic; from Viking voyages to an Ice Age xylophone. Never has reality so far surpassed mere fiction or fantasy than in this magnificent volume.

The White Lantern And Other Pursuits

In 1858, aged thirty-five, weak with malaria, isolated in the remote Spice Islands, Alfred Russel Wallace wrote to Charles Darwin: he had, he said excitedly, worked out a theory of natural selection. Darwin was aghast - his work of decades was about to be scooped. Within a fortnight, his outline and Wallace's paper were presented jointly in London. A year later, with Wallace still at the opposite side of the world, On the Origin of Species was published. Wallace had none of Darwin's advantages or connections. Born in Usk, Gwent, in 1823, he left school at fourteen and in his mid-twenties spent four years in the Amazon collecting for museums and wealthy patrons, only to lose all his finds in a shipboard fire in mid-Atlantic. He vowed never to travel again. Yet two years later he was off to the East Indies, beginning an eight-year trek over thousands of miles; here he discovered countless unknown species and identified for the first time the point of divide between Asian and Australian fauna, 'Wallace's Line'. With vigour and sensitivity, Peter Raby reveals Wallace as a courageous and unconventional explorer. After his return, he plunged into a variety of controversies, staying vital and alert until his death at the age of 90, in 1913. Gentle, self-effacing, and remarkably free from the racism that blighted so many of his contemporaries, Wallace is one of the neglected giants of the history of science and ideas. This stirring biography - the first for many years - puts him at centre stage, where he belongs.

Alfred Russel Wallace

Roger Scruton

Roger Scruton is one of the most widely respected philosophers of our time, whose often provocative views never fail to stimulate debate. In Modern Philosophy he turns his attention to the whole of the field, from the philosophy of logic to aesthetics, and in so doing provides us with an essential and comprehensive guide to modern thinking. Considered by many to be the best philosophical primer since Bertrand Russell's The Problems of Philosophy, this book is a must for both the student and the general reader.

Modern Philosophy

An Introduction and Survey

William Graves

In 1944, at the age of five, William Graves was taken from England to the delightful mountain village of Deya in Majorca, where his father - the poet Robert Graves - had returned with his new family to the place he had lived with Laura Riding before the war. 
 
Young William grew up in the shadow of this great writer in the Englishness of the Graves household, while experiencing the ways of life of the Majorcans, which had hardly changed for hundreds of years. 
 
Wonderfully observant, and full of feeling for the locality, this book is also a fascinating portrait of Robert Graves himself, his 'Muses', and his entourage, and a revealing study of how the son of a famous father finds his own identity.

Wild Olives

Life in Majorca With Robert Graves

David Quammen

For millennia, nature's biggest and fiercest predators have tormented mankind. The knowledge and fear of the existence of these ferocious man-eaters is forever in the back of our minds, looming in our worst nightmares. Millions of humans have suffered attacks by predators on land and at sea. Yet animals have always shared the landscape with humans. Since the dawn of time our ecosystems have been linked and humans have co-existed with flesh-eating beasts as members of the same food chain. Now, of course, as humans spread and despoil the planet, these fearsome predators may only survive on the other side of glass barriers and chain-link fences. Their gradual disappearance is changing the nature of our own existence. We no longer occupy an intermediate position on the food chain; instead we survey it invulnerably from above - so far above that we are in danger of forgetting that we even belong to an ecosystem. 
 
David Quammen's enthralling new book covers the four corners of the globe as he explores the fate of lions in India's Gir forest, saltwater crocodiles in Northern Australia, brown bears in the mountains of Romania, and Siberian tigers. Tracking these great and terrible beasts through the toughest terrain in the world, Quammen is equally intrigued by the traditional relationship between the great predators and the people who live among them, and weaves into his story the fears and myths that have haunted humankind for 3000 years.

Monster Of God

The Man-Eating Predator in the Jungles of History and the Mind

John Noble Wilford

An updated edition of the classic, much praised history of cartography. It traces the adventures, discoveries, and feats of technical ingenuity by which mapmakers, over the centuries, have succeeded in charting first the surface of the globe, then the earth's interior and the ocean floors, and finally the moon and the planets of our solar system. The author has added three new chapters, as well as many updates and amplifications, to reflect the great changes that have taken place in mapmaking in the past two decades. The Mapmakers will continue to be the definitive book on this fascinating subject.

The Mapmakers

Jonathan Miller

In this remarkable book Jonathan Miller considers the functioning of the body as a subject of private experience. He explores our attitudes towards the body, our astonishing ignorance about certain parts of it and our inability to read its signals. Taking as his starting point the experience of pain, Dr Miller explores the elaborate social process of 'falling ill', considers the physical foundations of 'dis-ease' and looks at the types of individuals man has historically attributed with the power of healing. 
 
His explanations are so lucid, so wide-ranging and so whole-heartedly entertaining it is often hard to believe one is reading about the facts of one's own body and what can go wrong with it. His use of metaphor and suggestive models, particularly when tracing the historical development of certain leading ideas in human physiology, is highly stimulating. Above all, there is the keen originality and sheer enthusiasm of Dr Miller's approach to his subject which makes The Body in Question such an outstanding book.

The Body In Question

Colin Tudge

Today we are developing a science that could change the world - for good or ill - more quickly and more profoundly than ever before. The science of genetics promises - or threatens - nothing less than the creation of life. 
 
Colin Tudge leads the reader gently through the deepest intricacies of genetics. He traces its history. He explores its awesome power and its current applications. And he speculates on its thrilling - or terrifying - future. He has written an essential book for anyone interested in the future of the human race.

Engineer In The Garden

Ben Shephard

'I wish you could be here," the Oxford Professor of Medicine wrote to a friend in 1915, "in this orgy of neuroses and psychoses and gaits and paralyses. I cannot imagine what has got into the central nervous system of the men.' 
 
A War of Nerves is a history of military psychiatry in the twentieth century - an authoritative, accessible account drawing on a vast range of diaries, interviews, medical papers and official records. It reaches back to the moment when the technologies of modern warfare and the disciplines of mental medicine first confronted each other on the Western Front, and traces their uneasy relationship through the eras of 'shell-shock', combat fatigue and 'post-traumatic stress disorder'. 
 
At once absorbing historical narrative and intellectual detective story, it tells the full story of 'shell-shock'; explains the disastrous psychological aftermath of Vietnam; and shows how psychiatrists kept men fighting in Burma. But it also tries to answer recurring questions about the effects of war. Why do some men crack and others not? Are the limits of resistance determined by character, heredity, upbringing, ideology or simple biochemistry? It explores the ethical dilemmas of the military psychiatrist - the 'machine gun behind the front', as Freud called him. Finally, it looks at the modern culture of 'trauma' and compensation spawned by the Vietnam War. 
 
A War of Nerves offers the general reader an indispensable guide to an important and controversial subject.

A War Of Nerves

This brilliant and ambitious book is an account of the events that made our world the place it is - geologically, climatically and ecologically - and a call for a new way of thinking about history. 'We learn', Tudge writes, 'to think only in desperately trivial twinklings of time. . . But this contracted view of time is not merely comic. It is dangerous. ' The proper sense of time, he argues, is one that allows us to appreciate the world and see what we are doing to it. If humankind is to survive, we must UNLEARN most of what made us good at dominating our environment up to now.

The Day Before Yesterday

Five Million Years of Human History

Gino Segrè

In 1932, the so-called annus mirabilis of modern physics, a group of scientists gathered in Copenhagen for a week-long conference on the extraordinary new work that was taking place in laboratories across the world; work that would ultimately lead to the development of nuclear weapons and the ensuing international power struggles. 
 
Segrè's erudite and impressive account explores this crucial moment in history through the lives and careers of seven physicists sitting in the front row of the Copenhagen meeting. Six of them were already in the pantheon of genius while the seventh - Max Delbrück - was the author of a skit performed at the conference that lightly parodied the struggle between the old and new theories of physics and eerily foreshadowed the events that were to unfold in the struggle between peaceful uses of scientific discovery and destructive ones.

Faust In Copenhagen

A Struggle for the Soul of Physics and the Birth of the Nuclear Age

Janet Browne

Few lives of great men offer so much interest - and so many mysteries - as the life of Charles Darwin, the greatest figure of nineteenth-century science, whose ideas are still inspiring discoveries and controversies more than 100 years after his death. Yet, only with the publication of Voyaging, the first volume of this acclaimed biography, do we have a truly vivid and comprehensive picture of Darwin as a man and a scientist. 
 
The second and final volume of Janet Browne's biography of Darwin - The Power of Place - is also available from Pimlico.

Charles Darwin: Voyaging

Volume 1 of a biography

Georgina Ferry

Few scientists have thought more deeply about their calling and its impact on humanity than Max Perutz (1914-2002). Born in Vienna, Jewish by descent, lapsed Catholic by religion, Max came to Cambridge in 1936, to join the lab of the legendary Communist thinker J.D. Bernal. In 1940 he was interned and deported to Canada as an enemy alien, only to be brought back and set to work on a bizarre top secret war project. 
 
Seven years later he founded the small research group in which Francis Crick and James Watson discovered the structure of DNA. Max Perutz himself explored the protein haemoglobin and his work, which won him a shared Nobel Prize in 1962, launched a new era of medicine, heralding today's astonishing advances in the genetic basis of disease. 
 
Max Perutz's story, wonderfully told by Georgina Ferry, brims with life; it has the zest of an adventure novel and is full of extraordinary characters. Max was demanding, passionate and driven but also humorous, compassionate and loving. Georgina Ferry's absorbing biography is a marvellous tribute to a great scientist.

Max Perutz And The Secret Of Life

Katherine Lambert

On 29 March 1912, as Scott and his two companions lay dying in their tent, elsewhere on the polar ice-cap six members of his ill-fated expedition were fighting for their lives.  This was the so-called Northern Party, hand-picked by Scott to undertake his most significant programme of scientific research.  The unsung hero of this group was Dr Murray Levick, whose attention to diet and mental and physical fitness played a major part in their survival.  The doctor was a sensitive recorder and a talented photographer, it is on his previously unpublished diaries, monographs, photographs and sketches that this book is based. The six men were landed by Terra Nova in January 1911 at Cape Adare, 450 miles north of Scott's base camp at Cape Evans.  They spent nearly a year there, living in a rudimentary hut, surveying and collecting specimens from the beautiful but inhospitable bay and shoreline fringed by inaccessible mountains.  They were then dropped off mid-way between the two Capes to continue their work.  The ship was due to pick them up on 17 February 1912.  A month later she still hadn't come, and the men were forced to face the Antarctic winter in an igloo dug out of a snowdrift on 'Inexpressible Island'.  After spending six-and-a-half months entombed in their underground ice-cave,in conditions of unimaginable physical and mental hardship,

Hell With A Capital H

A New Polar Hero

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