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 citize...| Simon Dobson
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 t...| Simon Dobson
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 ...| simondobson.org
Sara Lodge (2024) An popular distillation of a deep study of the literature and history of female detectives in fact and fiction. (Full disclosure: Lodge is a colleague of mine at St Andrews, although we've never met.) The genesis of the book comes from Lodge reading two fictional accounts of lady detectives written in 1862: what suddenly brought this about? She discovers a rich seam of "dime" or "penny dreadful" novels that feature lady sleuths as protagonists, as well as – less well-known...| Simon Dobson
Ben Macintyre (2016) The early history of the SAS, told with lots of references to the soldiers' own recollections. It's hard to imagine now how revolutionary David Stirling's ideas were in the 1940s. To remove warefare from the structured set-pieces of the First World War and replace them with a more fluid form that emphasised small strike teams causing havoc behind the recognised front lines, and forcing the enemy to respond by taking troops away from the main battles, was revolutionary. It...| Simon Dobson
Howard Marks (1996) The autobiography of a drug dealer, and it's captivating. Howard Marks went from being an Oxford student, to an Oxford academic, to being an international hashish smuggler. Not the world's largest, as his eventual indictment in America had it, but certainly on an epic scale. A lot of the story is quite humdrum, interesting only as background to Marks' own development and personal life. But there are some amazing anecdotes, such as shipping dope into America in the speaker ...| Simon Dobson
Jill Lepore (2020) A history of a forgotten company from what seems like a radically different time. The company, Simulmatics, essentially invented the field of data science applied to social sciences, and tried to apply these ideas to advertising, warfare, and law enforcement. Sound familiar? It's probably unsurprising that Simulmatics is forgotten: it was barely ever a functional company, and would perhaps never have achieved even the limited results it did without the quagmire of the Vietn...| Simon Dobson
Mary Roach (2003) An amusing and informative study of corpses. Not a sentence I ever expected to write. This is a book that digs into both the biology and the sociology of how we treat the dead. This includes the various uses made of cadavers over the year, from modern medical education to potions and "cures" made from mummies. Along the way we also get a discussion of different funeral practices being proposed by generations of free-thinkers and how they do (and don't) get adopted by wider s...| Simon Dobson
Naomi Klein (2023) What does it mean for someone to have a double? That is the broad premise of this book, and its a lot broader than it first appears. Klein's doppelganger is another author, Naomi Wolf. Both began as liberal and feminist darlings, before "Other Naomi" (Wolf) became a proponent of various consipracy theories and hanging out with right-wing influencers. The two Naomis starte being confused with each other within social media, to the estent that Klein almost starts to lose her ...| Simon Dobson
The modern history of a nation that’s been to some extent marginalised by wider geopolitics. It begins with domination by Japan in the late 19th century, which continued until the end of the Second World War – only to be replaced by domination through “trusteeship” by the US and others, which itself was a direct precursor to the partition of the nation, a vicious war, and a long and convoluted evolution of two very different political and economic outcomes.| simondobson.org