Einstein

It sounds like a Tom Stoppard play. A big-shot philosopher meets a big-shot boffin by way of a big-shot writer to descant on the biggest of big-shot debates – what The Rigor of Angels’s subtitle calls ‘the Ultimate Nature of Reality’.True, William Egginton can’t match Stoppard for punchy one-liners, nor for puns and pratfalls and persiflage. But while his book is as demanding a read as anything published this year, it still leaves you smiling. Over and over again the author reminds you of the shimmering weirdness beneath the experiential surface of what we are pleased to call the real world. There is no shortage of books that pit one

There are many ways to measure the course of human history and each will give an insight into one or more of the various qualities that have made us the most successful great ape. Every major advance, whether in war or art or literature, requires imagination, that most amazing of human capacities, and the ability to ask ‘What if?’ – to take the world from a different perspective. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the history of science. While there is an inherent provincialism in revolutions in art and literature, progress in science is universal, and moves, like Dante’s Hell, in concentric circles of ever deeper understanding. It is