Italo Calvino (1997)

Surrealist science fiction at its best. A selection of short stories told from the perspective of a being simultaneously almost god-like and hopelessly confused as the universe evolves around him (it?).

It’s a hard work to classify. My closest analogy would be with The Cyberiad, but with less narrative consistency and a far broader scope. Still, it’s extremely enjoyable, in a mind-bending way.

4/5. Finished Sunday 8 June, 2025.

(Originally published on Goodreads.)

Guy Hands (2012)

Are there lessons here? I’m not entirely sure. It’s certainly a rags-to-riches story of a self-made man, and a very entertaining and honest one. Whether it provides any insights into the world of private equity is less clear to me.

Hands made his money from corporate takeovers followed by ruthless cost-cutting and asset-stripping. This is good for him, possibly good for the next buyer – and utterly tragic for everyone else concerned, whose jobs are eliminated or consolidated with scarcely a backward glance, and the excuse that the companies would have failed anyway. That might be true, but it’s not a certainty, and it can only happen in a culture where everything has been financialised without any broader responsibilities being taken (or even admitted to exist). Hands’ later philanthrophy has to be set against this.

It all rather crashes down when Hands buys a record company, perhaps the epitome of a company whose value comes predominantly from the people it employs and not (as had been the rationale for the deal) from the back catalogue of hits. It shows how different companies and industries can be, flying in the face of the simplifications of finance that they can all be treated the same. Maybe that’s the lesson, albeit possibly an unintended one.

3/5. Finished Monday 2 June, 2025.

(Originally published on Goodreads.)

Michael Taylor (2024)

How dinosaurs drove the development of the theory of evolution – and a lot more.

It’s hard to credit that the first dinosaurs were only discovered at the end of the 18th century. They emerged into a world that had little doubt about the literal truth of biblical creation. They helped to shatter that certainty, although not alone and not at once.

This is a book that itself shatters several myths. It shows how Victorian scientists were as religious as their fellow citizens – and often more so – and how their faith coloured their interpretations of the evidence they themselves were discovering. It describes a Darwin too afraid of the possible social consequences ot publish his theories of natural selection as they are formed, and indeed he doesn’t publish them until he’s slowly built up his reputation as a naturalist through more traditional means: a level of patience that would be unthinkable today. And it shows that his interactions with Alfred Russel Wallace – often described as his rival – were marked by kindness and high regard on both sides, with Wallace modestly content in taking a supporting role (and later being a pallbearer at Darwin’s interrment in Westminster Abbey).

Over the source of the 19th century the religious certainties are challenged successfully, but there was nothing inevitable about the triumph and the opponents absolutely did not go quietly. Atheism remained the last taboo: long after Catholics and non-confirmist Protestants had their civil and political rights restored, atheists still had to fight to be allowed to take seats in Parliament. Taylor presents this as part of the conflict driven by the dinosaurs and the scientific changes their discovery drove, and it’s hard to argue with him.

There are some fascinating vignettes. My favourite is when Alfred Russel Wallace takes a bet to show the earth is not flat, and devises an ingenious method that of course doesn’t rely on any modern technology or arguments, but which is self-evidently correct. That there are still many flat-earthers even today is testament to the abiding need to keep pressing for science and evidence in public life.

5/5. Finished Tuesday 20 May, 2025.

(Originally published on Goodreads.)

Siobhan Roberts (2015)

A playful biography of one of the most creative mathematicians of modern times.

Both the title and sub-title are plays on words, which I’m sure Conway himself enjoyed. He is seen here as a genius playing with ideas, but his genius manifested itself through games, of which he was a prolific inventor; he was curious about everything he encountered, but was also unusual in the ways in which his mind approached challenges and indeed in what he saw as challenges.

It’s hard to read that Conway ended up hating his best-known invention, the Game of Life, when it’s been so influential on mathematicians, computer scientists, and the public at large. He saw it as the least amongst his discoveries, and indeed that’s an opinion that’s hard to fault: his discoveries in number theory, group theory, game theory, and other fields have been hugely influential, and each alone would have justified his fame. But they were also so technical as to be confined to a narrow group of specialists even within those specialist fields, whereas Life has achieved a life of its own in the popular imagination, it’s only real rival being the Mandelbrot set.

The Conway who emerges here would, I think, have been enormous fun to know and talk with – as long as you didn’t actually have to work with him or get anything from him, in which case he would be a frustrating and unpredictable collaborator. His several books were written with collaborators who needed patience to deal with him and get him to finish his commitments: they probably only hung-in with him because of a determination to give him the credit he was due. (It’s interesting that two collaborators once dealt with this by removing him as a co-author and instead putting his name in the paper’s title!) He was similarly unpredictable as a speaker, sometimes incredbly charismatic and sometimes failing terribly due to lack of preparation: never a sighn of someone who cares about their audience, although he clearly did care desperately, at least sometimes.

Conway’s was a talent that the scientific world needs, not content to stay with a single field but contributing widely and thereby bringing his wider expertise to bear on problems that might otherwise have remained unexplored. There’s a confidence in such an approach that’s sometimes hard to summon-up in today’s academia, which rewards increasigly incremental contributions of increasingly narrow depth. Conway was aware of this, but chose (or felt compelled by his own nature) to ignore it, and that’s admirable in itself.

4/5. Finished Saturday 10 May, 2025.

(Originally published on Goodreads.)

Chantry Westwell (2021)

If you love mediaeval illumination, this book is a feast. It covers a huge period, focusing mainly on the 14th and 15th centuries, discussing manuscripts collected together by broad themes: love stories, bestiaries, histories, and the like. In the process it also elaborates the underlying stories, so that the illumination makes sense. A lot of these are intricate and deserving whole books in themselves (which many have had, of course): different manuscripts use different variants of the same underlying myths. I was unfamiliar with most of the detail.

But it’s the illustrations that are the jewels, of course. Westwell works at the British Library, and so has access to one of the world’s largest collections of illuminated manuscripts. The individual letters, borders, and marginal drawings are a complete joy to explore, often with several manuscripts on a common theme set side by side to show the evolution of style and the ways in which the illuminators were thinking about their subjects. Together with the often rude and/or surreal images common to the period, this is a book I will be coming back t time and again.

5/5. Finished Monday 28 April, 2025.

(Originally published on Goodreads.)