Reviewed by Rebecca Foster When I first heard about journalist Polly Morland’s A Fortunate Woman: A Country Doctor’s Story, which was later shortlisted for the 2022 Baillie Gifford Prize, I…
Review by Liz Dexter Millions of women carry an abundance of positive memories of their time in sport, but they also carry the invisible wounds of their sports experiences. As…
Review by Annabel The New Year always brings with it a slew of self-help books about becoming the better/fitter/healthier/wealthier you. I look at these books and think – really? Why…
Review by Basil Ransome-Davies This book coaxed me onside before I had begun reading it, for its design and artwork. Its appearance is bold, charming and slightly creepy. On the…
Review by Annabel Lindsey Fitzharris is an American with a doctorate from Oxford in the History of Science, Medicine and Technology, and a post-doc fellowship from the Wellcome Trust. Her…
Review by Terence Jagger We are all aware of placebos and their effects – the idea that a totally inactive substance can have a similar effect to, for example, a…
Reviewed by Rebecca Foster May is Maternal Mental Health Awareness Month and so the perfect time to consider two memoirs of postnatal depression, one that was just published this month…
Reviewed by Annabel Dr Andrew Lees is a neurology professor at the National Hospital in London the first English hospital dedicated exclusively to treating the diseases of the nervous system….
Review by Annabel Gaskell Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, her novel conceived during that momentous trip to Geneva in 1816 during ‘the year without a summer’, is supremely concerned with the subject…
Reviewed by Rebecca Foster I don’t know about you, but I can’t get enough of Covid-19 chronicles. My favourites of the twenty-some I’ve read thus far have come from the…
Reviewed by Rebecca Foster Olivia Laing has established herself as a group biographer par excellence, taking as her subjects alcoholic writers for the superb The Trip to Echo Spring (2013,…
By Liz Dexter This book is primarily concerned with explaining how society, as it is currently arranged, often makes trans people’s lives unnecessarily difficult. Yet, in posing solutions to these…
Reviewed by Harriet If there’s one thing that this impressively learned and wide-ranging volume amply demonstrates, it’s that an interest in magic and witchcraft has persisted through the ages in…
Review by Terence Jagger This is a fascinating book, one I bought after hearing the author give an inspiring presentation to the Royal Institution. He starts by recounting how his…
Reviewed by Lory Widmer-Hess Schizophrenic. The very word is a trigger for aversion, a signal to run away, with its spiky, spluttered consonants and imprisoned vowels, four foreign syllables meaning…
Reviewed by Peter Reason It was on a family skiing holiday that Horatio Clare finally went mad. This was the culmination of a period of high activity and stress, coupled…
Reviewed by Annabel Kings College Hospital-based Professor Tim Spector’s name is, I hope, becoming more widely known in the UK since the pandemic began. He’s been involved in the development…
Reviewed by Terence Jagger This is a wonderful book, and the real title is the sub-title: A Neuroscientist’s Guide to Ageing Well. It is not in any sense a self…
Reviewed by Rebecca Foster When the Wainwright Prize longlists (for writing on UK nature and global conservation themes) were announced in early June, Dara McAnulty broke two records as the…
Review by Terence Jagger I found this book absolutely fascinating. I have always been fairly confident in my abilities as a navigator (though with occasional disasters) but I have always…
The Wellcome Book Prize is on hiatus this year – we really hope it’ll return in 2021 as this unique prize, which celebrates literature with health, illness and medicine themes,…
The Wellcome Book Prize is on hiatus this year – we really hope it’ll return in 2021 as this unique prize, which celebrates literature with health, illness and medicine themes,…
Reviewed by Rebecca Foster Back in early March, just before literary events started being cancelled due to coronavirus, I had the good fortune to see Lucy Jones at Hungerford Town…
Review by Peter Reason This is a book about the philosophical perspective of panpsychism, written by a leading academic advocate. Panpsychism is an awkward word, not part of everyday vocabulary….
