Rosenberg and Grafton’s Cartographies of Time (2010) is a lovely book to look at. It has an elegant design, and is illustrated in four colour throughout. Most of the timelines mentioned are …
Not all scientists are like Darwin. This is clear from a fascinating book (Darwin’s Backyard, by James Costa) about Darwin’s second life: not the five years he spent on the Beagle Expedition, but the remainder of his life, which …
Steven Gump’s book How to Review Scholarly Books, published just a few weeks ago (June 2025), is a very timely work: it tells you how to write a scholarly review. As the author acknowledged when I interviewed him, this …
Halliwell’s Film Guide is a collection of film reviews, first published 1977, and reprinted many times over at least 25 years. I still have a copy of this guide, and I’m afraid to say I …
A page from Baskerville’s edition of The Bible, 1763 [public domain]
I like the Very Short Introductions, which often give me an overview of a subject in just a few pages, so I was very enthusiastic to read Typography: A very …
The Alignment Problem (2020) is an excellent resource for anyone seeking a clear and informed view of the limitations, as well as the opportunities, of current AI tools. Having read Christian’s last, co-authored, book, Algorithms to Live By (2016), I was …
I can’t resist a book that proposes to tell me about the history of reading. It is, to be fair, a challenging subject, covering thousands of years, and the entirety of the world. So, before immersing myself in the details of …
Daniel Russell was for over ten years the head of search at Google, so a book by him about search raises considerable expectations. His book is written for the common reader, I accept, but it was a bit of a shock …
Devotees of human indexing (see, for example, Dennis Duncan, Index, A History of the) might want to try looking up a place in index of the Pevsner Architectural Guides to Scotland, specifically, the volume for Dundee and Angus (by John …
