Foreword
Mrs Jenny Hill, Murray Centre and Library Manager
Reading for pleasure is a magical thing. Once you find the book that hooks you in (and there really is one for everyone), you will start a lifetime journey that will take you to new worlds, new ideas and new friends without ever leaving the comfort of your armchair. Reading truly expands your horizons and feeds your imagination in a way that nothing else can. But here’s the magical bit – without even being aware of it, the enjoyment of reading has a hugely positive impact on your brain. There is a growing body of evidence that points to readers achieving greater academic success – even in maths! As you absorb the vocabulary, the grammar and the syntax while you read, your writing skills automatically improve. In addition, readers have an increased ability to empathise with other people and understand their motivations; to be tolerant and learn from others’ perspectives. Perhaps most importantly, reading has a hugely positive impact on your mental health and wellbeing. Losing yourself in a good book really does reduce your levels of stress and anxiety.
In this reading list you will find a wide choice of fiction titles across a range of genres to help you start or continue your reading adventure. In addition, you will find non-fiction books recommended by our academic departments to widen your knowledge of the subjects you study. Do make sure you visit our beautiful library at the top of the Murray Centre where you can borrow books and seek advice on what to read next.
‘A book is a gift you can open again and again.’
Garrison Keillor
Sixth Form
These books are recommended for ages 16+
Key
Advisory note: this book contains more challenging themes that some readers may find upsetting. If you are unsure, please seek advice from a member of staff.
EDI This book is part of our Equality, Diversity and Inclusion Suggested Reading list.
Table of Contents
Fiction
Non-fiction
Recommendations from the Art History Department
Recommendations from the Business Department
Recommendations from the Drama Department
Recommendations from the Economics Department
Recommendations from the English Department
Recommendations from the Geography Department
Recommendations from the History Department
Recommendations from the Maths Department
Recommendations from the Modern Languages Department
Recommendations from the Music Department
Recommendations from the Politics Department
Recommendations from the RS Department
Recommendations from the PE Department
Recommendations from the Science Department
Fiction
Chimamanda Ngozi
Adichie Americanah – fearless, gripping, spanning three continents and numerous lives, the National Book Critics Circle Award-winning Americanah is a richly told story of love and expectation set in today’s globalized world. EDI
Purple Hibiscus – Adichie’s first book, set in Nigeria, follows the fortunes of Kambili and Jaja in their privileged but suffocating world. As the country falls apart under a military coup, they move to their aunt’s house outside the city and discover a different world. A brilliant story about the emotional turmoil of adolescence and the powerful bonds of family. EDI
Naomi Alderman The Power – in this gender-twisting dystopian novel, all over the world, women are discovering they have the power to inflict pain and even death with a flick of their fingers. Suddenly, men find that they are losing control – but where will it end? This novel explores the true nature of power and if the inequality between sexes is based on fundamental differences or historic social conventions. (Recommended by the English Department)
The Future The Future is a handful of friends the daughter of a cult leader, a non-binary hacker, an ousted Silicon Valley visionary, the concerned wife of a dangerous CEO, and an internet-famous survivalist hatching a daring plan. It could be the greatest heist ever. Or the cataclysmic end of civilization.
Kate Atkinson Life after Life – if there were infinite chances to live your life would you save the world?
A God in Ruins – a sister book to Life after Life, the story of Ursula’s younger brother.
Jane Austen Pride and Prejudice – this timeless romance novel explores the social constraints and prejudices of 19th Century England, focusing on the tumultuous relationship between the spirited Elizabeth Bennet and the haughty Mr Darcy.
Emma / Persuasion – more novels from Jane Austen that draw the reader into the Regency world of manners, marriages and women’s identity in society. (Recommended by the English Department)
J.G.Ballard Empire of the Sun – an extraordinary account of a British boy’s life in a Japanese-occupied Shanghai during WWII.
John Barth Lost in the Funhouse – John Barth’s collection of short stories, Lost in the Funhouse, represents the height of postmodernism. It is playful, highly selfreferential and probably unlike anything that you have read before. The narrator, for example, frequently refers to the act of writing itself. As such, the author will use a certain metaphor and then the narrator will explain the reason behind using it. The narrator will also frequently break the fourth wall and address the reader and comment on the characters as narrative constructs. Whilst it is not for everyone, Barth’s ultimate aim in writing the stories in this manner is to question the very notion of reality and objective truth. (Recommended by the English Department)
David Boling Guernica – an epic tale of love, family and war set in the Basque town of Guernica before, during and after its destruction by the German Luftwaffe during the Spanish Civil War. It creates an imaginary context for the famous painting of the devastation by Picasso. (Recommended by the History of Art Department)
John Boyne
The Heart’s Invisible Furies – a story set in 1940s Ireland about Cyril Avery, adopted by a well-to-do if eccentric Dublin couple. Cyril knows he is gay but he lives in a society where this is not accepted. We follow his adventures through life and his wry observation of changing attitudes to sex and Catholicism.
EDI
Alexandra Bracken Lore – from the No.1 New York Times bestselling author of THE DARKEST MINDS comes a high-octane story of power, destiny and redemption. A lifetime ago, Lore Perseous left behind the brutal, opulent world of the Agon families - ancient Greek bloodlines that participate in a merciless game every seven years. A game that is about to begin again.
Ray Bradbury
Fahrenheit 451 – seventy years after its original publication, this classic of world literature still resonates today. Set in a bleak, dystopian future where books have been outlawed, it tells the story of Guy Montag, a fireman tasked with setting fire to illegal books, whose life changes when he meets the gentle Clarisse. (Classic Literature)
Vera Brittain Testament of Youth – the passionate tale of a lost generation, this is one of the most famous autobiographies of the First World War. Very readable.
Tracy Chevalier
Wilkie Collins
Anita Diamant
The Lady and the Unicorn – keen to demonstrate his new-found favour with the King, rising nobleman, Jean le Viste, commissions six tapestries to adorn the walls of his château. He expects soldiers and bloody battlefields but the artist instead designs a seductive world of women, unicorns and flowers using as his muses, Le Viste’s wife Geneviève and daughter Claude. (Recommended by the History of Art Department)
The Woman in White – an intricately constructed suspense filled tale of deceit and trickery set against a background of Victorian madness and melodrama
The Red Tent – a fascinating book giving an insight into women’s lives in biblical times. The story of Dinah and her mothers, the four wives of Jacob
Philip K. Dick Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? – Science Fiction, turned into the cult classic film Blade Runner
Charles Dickens Bleak House – the obscure legal case of Jarndyce and Jarndyce is at the centre of what some regard as the best of Dickens’s novels.
Great Expectations – a profound coming-of-age tale that follows the life of orphan Pip who rises from unfortunate circumstances through an anonymous benefactor, confronting themes of wealth, class, love and betrayal. (Recommended by the English Department)
Patrick Dillon
Our Mutual Friend – a satiric masterpiece about the allure and peril of money, this is Dickens’s last complete book. The pretensions of the nouveaux riche, the ingenuousness of the aspiring poor and the unfailing power of wealth to corrupt are its typically Dickensian themes.
The Old Curiosity Shop – a moving Victorian tale with heartfelt melodrama. (Recommended by the Learning Skills Department) (Classic Literature)
Ithaca - Telemachus's journey takes him across the landscape of bronze-age Greece in the aftermath of the great Trojan war. Veterans hide out in the hills. Chieftains, scarred by war, hoard their treasure in luxurious palaces. Ithaca re-tells Homer's famous poem, The Odyssey, from the point of view of Odysseus' resourceful and troubled son, describing Odysseus's extraordinary voyage from Troy to the gates of hell, and Telemachus's own journey from boyhood to the desperate struggle that wins back his home...and his father. (Recommended by the Classics Department)
Fyodor Dostoyevsky The Brothers Karamazov – encased within this tome, based on the lives of the Karamazov Brothers who are dealing with the murder of their father, are some of the greatest Philosophical and Theological thought experiments in the history ofliterature. The dialogues between Dmitri and Alyosha cast a piercing eye on the nature of human freedom and suffering and in turn plunge a spear into the heart of mankind’s relationship with God. (Recommended by the RS Department - Classic Literature)
Arthur Conan Doyle The Hound of the Baskervilles – Sherlock rises to the challenge in this chilling tale. (Recommended by the Learning Skills Department)
Umberto Eco The Name of the Rose – a historical murder mystery set in an Italian monastery in the year 1327. William of Baskerville is brought in to investigate heresy in a Benedictine abbey but when his delicate mission is overshadowed by seven bizarre deaths, he turns detective.
George Eliot The Mill on the Floss; Middlemarch – Eliot was able to perfect what has since become known as literary realism. Her novels, the most perfect of which is Middlemarch, were able to render the minutiae of everyday life in a manner that is both beautiful and evocative. Like Wordsworth who came before her, Eliot’s ambition was to elevate the ordinary into the realm of the extraordinary and this aim was certainly achieved. (Recommended by the English Department)
Bernadine Evaristo Girl, Woman, Other – (Booker Prize Winner 2019) – tracks the lives of twelve very different characters. Mostly women, black and British, they tell the stories of their families, friends and lovers. ‘Masterful…a choral love song to black womanhood in modern Great Britain.’ Elle EDI
Sebastian Faulks Birdsong – a moving story of love, war and survival follows young Englishman Stephen Wraysford as he arrives in France in 1910, falls in love with Isabelle then goes to fight on the Western Front. Life can never be the same again.
Elizabeth
Freemantle
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Disobedient – a novel based on the life of Artemisia Gentileschi – the greatest female painter of the Renaissance – as she forges her own destiny in a world dominated by the will of men. (Recommended by the Art History Department)
Tender is the Night – the tragic tale of a young actress, Rosemary Hoyt, and her complicated relationship with a glamorous American couple. (Classic Literature)
E M Forster A Passage to India – when Adela Quested and her elderly companion arrive in the Indian town of Chandrapore, they quickly feel trapped by the insular and prejudiced ‘AngloIndian’ community. Determined to escape and see the ‘real India’, they seek the guidance of the charming Dr Aziz.
Howard’s End – ‘only connect’ is the idea at the heart of this book, a heartbreaking tale of three families at the beginning of the twentieth century. Frequently cited as E.M.Forster’s finest work, it brilliantly explores class warfare, conflict and the English character.
A Room with a View – An Edwardian tale of love with satirical elements and an Italian setting. (Recommended by the Learning Skills Department.) (Classic Literature)
Patrick Gale
Notes from an Exhibition – The best-selling story of an artist tormented by depression and the toll of creativity. A tender story of enduring love and a portrait of a family coping with the sometimes too dazzling brilliance of genius. (Recommended by the Art Department)
Damon Galgut
Bonnie Garmus
The Promise (2021 Booker Prize winner) – charts the crash and burn of a white South African family, living on a farm outside Pretoria. The Swarts are gathering for Ma’s funeral The younger generation detest everything the family stand for – not least the failed promise to their maid Salome, who has worked for the family her whole life, to give her the house that she lives in. As decades pass, the promise remains unfulfilled and emotional truths hit home. A worthy Booker winner indeed.
Lessons in Chemistry – a wonderful debut novel set in 1960s America Chemist, Elizabeth Zott, is no ordinary woman. As a scientist in an all-male research institute, an unmarried mother and ultimately a TV star, she fights sexism and misogyny at every turn. But Elizabeth Zott won’t lie down and take it. Funny, inspiring and powerful – a must-read!
Elizabeth Gaskell
Thomas Hardy
North and South - a tale of love, growth, and change Gaskell skilfully fuses individual feeling with social concern and, in Margaret Hale, creates one of the most original heroines of Victorian literature.
The Return of the Native – the story of proud and passionate Eustacia’s doomed marriage (Classic Literature)
Emily Hauser For the Most Beautiful – the story of Krisayis, daughter of the Trojans' High Priest, and of Briseis, princess of Pedasus, who fight to determine the fate of a city and its people in this ancient time of mischievous gods and mythic heroes. (Recommended by the Classics Department)
Natalie Haynes The Children of Jocasta – Jocasta is just fifteen when she is told that she must marry the King of Thebes, an old man she has never met. Her life has never been her own, and nor will it be, unless she outlives her strange, absent husband. Ismene is the same age when she is attacked in the palace she calls home. Since the day of her parents' tragic deaths a decade earlier, she has always longed to feel safe with the family she still has. But with a single act of violence, all that is about to change. With the turn of these two events, a tragedy is set in motion. But not as you know it. (Recommended by the Classics Department)
Divine Might: Goddesses in Greek Myth – these are the stories of the Greek goddesses. As fearsome, powerful and beloved as their male counterparts, it’s time to look beyond the columns of a ruined temple to the awesome power within. (Recommended by the Art History Department)
Joseph Heller Catch 22 – a classic satire set at the end of WWII. (Classic Literature)
Susan Hill
Strange Meeting – an absorbing story of friendship in the trenches. EDI
The Woman in Black – A spine-tingling recipe for sleeplessness! (Recommended by the Learning Skills Department.)
Nick Hornby High Fidelity – the story centres around Rob, who deals ineptly with his failing relationships and work at Championship Vinyl (a record shop): creating playlists and top five ‘desert island discs’ is a fine way to pass the time, but similar lists do not help all aspects of his life. (Recommended by the Music Department)
Fever Pitch – as a young boy, growing up in London and watching his parents' marriage fall apart, Nick Hornby had little sense of home. Then his dad took him to Highbury. Arsenal's football ground would become the source of many of the strongest feelings he'd ever have: joy, humiliation, heartbreak, frustration and hope. (Recommended by the P.E Department)
Khaled Hosseini A Thousand Splendid Suns – Mariam is only fifteen when she is sent to Kabul to marry Rasheed. Nearly two decades later, a friendship grows between Mariam and a local teenager, Laila, as strong as the ties between mother and daughter. When the Taliban take over, life becomes a desperate struggle against starvation, brutality and fear. Yet love can move a person to act in unexpected ways and lead them to overcome the most daunting obstacles with a startling heroism. (Recommended by the Geography Department) EDI
Kazuo Ishiguro
Never Let Me Go – three friends spend their childhood at Hailsham a seemingly idyllic English boarding school. When they leave school, they are told their terrible fate.
Henry James The Europeans – a subtle and gently ironic examination of manners and morals, the impact of Old World experience on New World innocence. (Classic Literature)
James Joyce Ulysses; A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man; The Dubliners – this is the apotheosis of the modernist novel and Joyce seeks to record as precisely as possible the inner-most workings of one’s mind. What matters is not the object being perceived, but rather the perceiver and with this he instituted
a radical conceptual shift from what came before. This philosophical mission was epitomised by his use of stream-of-consciousness in Ulysses, but it is for good reason that this novel has a reputation for being one of the most complex ever written. Given this, you might like to begin with Dubliners or Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man before then graduating to the life-changing literary experience that is Ulysses (Recommended by the English Department)
Toshikazu Kawaguchi Before the Coffee Gets Cold – in a small back alley in Tokyo, there is a café that offers a unique experience: the chance to travel back in time. This is a beautiful, moving story, written in 2015, that bears the hallmarks of a modern cult classic.
Ken Kesey One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest – set in the ward of a 1950s psychiatric hospital, the protagonist is a man who suffers from schizophrenia. Through his eyes, we see the reality experienced by the patients; their living conditions and the medical treatments they are subjected to. (Classic Literature)
Cesca Major The Silent Hours – based on a true event, this historical novel, written by a DH alumna, moves between a French village during WW2 and 1952 as we learn the horrific story of what happened to make a woman being nursed at the Saint Cecilia Nunnery a mute. Haunting.
Hillary Mantel
Wolf Hall (2009 Man Booker), Bring up the Bodies (2013 Costa Award) and The Mirror and the Light (shortlisted for The Women’s Prize for Fiction 2020) – Wolf Hall charts Thomas Cromwell’s rise to power, the sequel the destruction of Anne Boleyn as seen by Cromwell and in the final book, Mantel covers his final years. ‘Her Cromwell novels are, for my money, the greatest English novels of this century.’ The Observer
Yan Martell The Life of Pi – Philosophy and imagination run riot in this “hard to put down” work of fiction. (Recommended by the Learning Skills Department.)
Ian McEwan Atonement – widely regarded as one of McEwan’s best works, this follows the consequences of a teenage girl’s half-innocent mistake that condemns the wrong man to be imprisoned for rape. Spanning three time periods from 1935, through WWII to modern day England, this is an exploration of guilt, family and the repercussions of a single moment in life.
Madeleine Miller Circe – a brilliant retelling of Circe’s story from the witch herself. This book weaves the stories of Scylla, Odysseus, the Minotaur and many others. (Recommended by the Classics Department)
Toni Morrison Beloved – It is the mid-1800s and as slavery looks to be coming to an end, Sethe is haunted by the violent trauma it wrought on her former enslaved life at Sweet Home, Kentucky. Her dead baby daughter, whose tombstone bears the single word, Beloved, returns as a spectre to punish her mother, but also to elicit her love. Told with heart-stopping clarity, mixing horror and beauty, Beloved is Toni Morrison's enduring masterpiece. EDI
Vladimir Nabokov Pale Fire; Lolita; Ada – Nabokov is, without a doubt, one of the most skilful and beautiful prose stylists that ever lived. This is exemplified by his highly controversial novel Lolita, which charts a grown man’s nefarious relationship with a fourteenyear-old girl. Nabokov’s project in writing the novel was to see whether he could transform something morally repugnant into something beautiful by language alone. One might disagree with the moral validity of the project, but one cannot fault its aesthetic attributes. (Recommended by the English Department)
Irène Némirovsky Suite Française – in 1941, sat down to write a book that would convey the magnitude of what she was living through by evoking the domestic lives and personal trials of the ordinary citizens of France, Némirovsky's death in Auschwitz in 1942 prevented her from seeing the day, sixty-five years later, that the existing two sections of her planned novel sequence, Suite Française, would be rediscovered and hailed as a masterpiece. (Recommended by the Languages Department)
Maggie O’Farrell Hamnet – a wonderful novel that breathes life into the littleknown story behind Shakespeare’s most enigmatic play Hamnet is the eleven-year-old son of a husband and wife in Stratford. The son dies from the plague in 1596 and four years later the husband writes a play called Hamlet. A beautifullywritten story of love and grief that shines a spotlight on the private life of our most famous playwright.
The Marriage Portrait – O’Farrell paints just as evocative a picture of Renaissance Italy as she did of Shakespearean England, as Cosimo de’ Medici’s third daughter learns to navigate an opaque Florentine court and an enigmatic new husband. Her proximity to power places her in mortal danger. (Recommended by the Art History Department)
George Orwell 1984 – a chilling depiction of a dystopian future where society is under complete surveillance by a totalitarian regime led by Big Brother. The book delves into the dangers of absolute authority and the power of propaganda. (Recommended by the English Department)
Delia Owens Where the Crawdads Sing – who is the marsh girl? Why does she haunt the beautiful backwaters of the North Carolina Coast? What does she know about the suspected murder of a young man found dead under a deserted watchtower? Delia Owens’s debut novel will have you reading until dawn. EDI
Laline Paull The Bees – a mix of The Handmaid’s Tale and the Hunger Games, this is the story of feisty bee, Flora 717. It plunges you into a world controlled by the mantra ‘accept, obey serve’. A great summer read which will alter your perception of bees.
Mary Renault
The King must Die (part one of two books about Theseus) – the story follows Theseus’s adventures from Troizen to Eleusis, where the death in the book’s title is to take place, and from Athens to Crete, where he learns to jump bulls and is named king of the victims. Richly imbued with the spirit of its time, this is a page-turner as well as a daring act of imagination. (Recommended by the Classics Department)
Jean Rhys Wide Sargasso Sea – the story of Jane Eyre's 'madwoman in the attic', Bertha Rochester. Born into the oppressive, colonialist society of 1930s Jamaica, white Creole heiress Antoinette meets a young Englishman who is drawn to her innocent beauty and sensuality. After their marriage, however, disturbing rumours begin to circulate which poison her husband against her. Caught between his demands and her own precarious sense of belonging, Antoinette is inexorably driven towards madness, and her husband into the arms of another novel's heroine.
Sally Rooney Normal People – (winner of the Costa Novel Award 2018) Connell and Marianne grow up in the same small town in the west of Ireland, but the similarities end there. Connell is popular and well-liked, Marianne is a loner. But when the two strike up a conversation, something life-changing begins.
Arundhati Roy The God of Small Things – this is the story of Rahel and Estha, twins growing up among the banana vats and peppercorns of their blind grandmother’s factory, and amid scenes of political turbulence in Kerala. Armed only with the innocence of youth, they fashion a childhood in the shade of the wreck that is their family: their lonely, lovely mother, their beloved Uncle Chacko (pickle baron, radical Marxist, bottom-pincher) and their sworn enemy, Baby Kochamma (ex-nun, incumbent grand-aunt). Arundhati Roy’s Booker Prize-winning novel was the literary sensation of the 1990s: a story anchored to anguish but fuelled by wit and magic. (Recommended by the RS Department)
Salman Rushdie
Midnight’s Children – born at the stroke of midnight at the exact moment of India’s independence in 1947, Saleem is a special child with telepathic powers that link him to other ‘midnight’s children’. Saleem’s story is whirlwind of disasters and triumphs, mirroring the course of modern India’s history. (Recommended by the English Department)
Lisa See The Island of Sea Women – set on the Korean island of Jeju, we follow the lives of two women who join their village’s diving collective, from the 1930s through to modern day. This is a beautiful novel that illuminates a unique culture where women undertake the dangerous physical work to earn a living and the men stay at home to look after the children
Vikram Seth A Suitable Boy; Two Lives, and An Equal Music – three wonderfully crafted tales ideal to keep you going all summer.
An Equal Music – set in London, this love story between a violinist in a string quartet and someone he knew previously at Music College, is packed with musical references from start to finish.
J.D.Salinger
Ali Smith
Catcher in the Rye – this iconic novel portrays the internal struggle of teenager Holden Caulfield who, disenchanted with the adult world’s hypocrisy and superficiality, seeks to protect the innocence of himself and others. (Recommended by the English Department)
How to be Both (2015 Bailey’s Women’s Prize for Fiction) – two tales of love and injustice, one about Francesco, a female Renaissance fresco painter, the other about Charlie, a teenage girl coming to terms with her mother’s death. These are stories that link across time but can be read in either order EDI
Zadie Smith White Teeth – set amidst the racial and cultural tapestry of London, the story centres on two unlikely friends, veterans of WWII, and their families. Funny, generous and big-hearted, this became one of the most talked about debut novels of all time. EDI
Mari Strachan The Earth Hums in B Flat – Gwenni is 12, bookish and with a wild imagination; at night she flies around her small Welsh town and loves to play detective. She believes she can hear the earth hum in B flat. This quirky tale of everyday life also deals with the darker subjects of depression and domestic abuse. (Recommended by the Music Department)
Tara M. Stringfellow Memphis - spellbinding debut novel tracing three generations of a Southern Black family and one daughter’s discovery that she has the power to change her family’s legacy. EDI
Douglas Stuart Shuggie Bain (2020 Booker Prize winner) – Agnes Bain has always expected more of life, dreaming of a life beyond her tenement in 1980s Glasgow. But when she is abandoned by her philandering husband and she sinks deeper into drink, her children try their best to save her but one by one they must abandon her to save themselves. Only her youngest, Shuggie, holds out hope. This is an uncompromising and searingly honest portrayal of poverty and the devastating effects of alcohol addiction which manages, at the same time, to exude warmth and humour.
Jonathan Swift Gulliver’s Travels; A Tale of the Tub; ‘A Modest Proposal’ – like Pope, Swift is a master satirist. His essay ‘A Modest Proposal’ proposes to solve the Irish famine by selling children to the rich as food. The suggestion was, of course, not serious, but rather is an attempt to poke fun at the attitudes towards the poor of the time. (Recommended by the English Department)
W M Thackeray Vanity Fair – join Becky Sharpe the first modern heroine in her adventures. (Classic Literature)
Rupert Thomson Secrecy – it is Florence, 1691. The Renaissance is long-gone and the city is a dark, repressive place where everything is forbidden and anything is possible. Zummo is a maker of waxwork figures at the Medici court who becomes involved in a web of intrigue, corruption and murder. (Recommended by the Art History Department)
Leo Tolstoy Anna Karenina – a breathtaking tapestry of late nineteenth century Russian life. (Classic Literature)
The Death of Ivan Ilyich – a dying lawyer reflects on his life and his relationships. Existentially hard-hitting and sceptical look at life - this book will not cheer you up! (Recommended by the RS Department)
Rose Tremain Music and Silence – set in the Danish court in the middle of the 17th Century, a young English lute player joins the royal orchestra; the musicians perform in a cold cellar beneath the royal apartments in a place where forces of light and dark, good and evil are waging war to the death. (Recommended by the Music Department)
Anne Tyler The Accidental Tourist – Macon Leary is a travel writer who hates both travel and anything out of the ordinary. He is grounded by loneliness and
an unwillingness to compromise his creature comforts when he meets Muriel, a deliciously peculiar dog-obedience trainer who up-ends Macon’s insular world and thrusts him headlong into a remarkable engagement with life.
Evelyn Waugh Scoop – written in 1938, this is a brilliant satire of sensational journalism and foreign correspondents which is timeless. (Classic Literature)
Edith Wharton
Oscar Wilde
Thornton Wilder
The Age of Innocence (1921 Pulitzer Prize) – an upper-class East Coast American couple's impending marriage is threatened by the arrival of her scandal-plagued cousin from Europe
The House of Mirth – the story of Lily Bart, a wealthy socialite imprisoned within the society in which she lives. An American classic with a strong heroine. (Recommended by the Learning Skills Department - Classic Literature)
The Picture of Dorian Gray – Wilde’s only novel is the dreamlike story of a young man who sells his soul for eternal youth and beauty.
Sarah Winman
John Wyndham
Richard Yates
Gabrielle Zevin
Émile Zola
The Bridge of San Luis Rey – American author Thornton Wilder's second novel, first published in 1927 to worldwide acclaim. It tells the story of several interrelated people who die in the collapse of an Inca rope bridge in Peru, and the events that lead up to their being on the bridge. A friar who has witnessed the tragic accident then goes about inquiring into the lives of the victims, seeking some sort of cosmic answer to the question of why each had to die. The novel won the Pulitzer Prize in 1928. Philosophically, Thornton Wilder said that he was posing a question: "Is there a direction and meaning in lives beyond the individual's own will?" (Recommended by the RS Department)
Still Life – as bombs fall in Italy in 1944, Ulysses Temper, a young British soldier and Evelyn Skinner, a 64-year-old art historian share an extraordinary evening in a Tuscan wine cellar. Their chance encounter will transform Ulysses’ life and all those who love him back in London. A glorious book full of unforgettable characters. (Recommended by the Art History Department)
The Chrysalids – A dystopian tale of post-apocalyptic mutants, badlands and fundamentalism. (Recommended by the Learning Skills Department.)
Revolutionary Road – Frank and April are a bright young couple who are bored by the banalities of suburban life and long to be extraordinary. But the changes they make lead to betrayal and tragedy.
Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow - in this exhilarating novel, two friends often in love, but never lovers come together as creative partners in the world of video game design, where success brings them fame, joy, tragedy, duplicity, and, ultimately, a kind of immortality.
The Dream – a tale of the impossibility of love in the face of social constraints
Non-Fiction
Suggestions from the Art History Department
Jill Burke How to be a Renaissance Woman: The Untold History of Beauty and Female Creativity – an alternative history of the Renaissance as seen through the emerging literature of beauty tips, focusing on the actresses, authors and courtesans who rebelled against the misogyny of their era.
Katy Hessel
Neil MacGregor
The Story of Art Without Men – this exciting revisionist history of art turns the limelight on women artists’ creativity and the way it has shaped and enriched our world.
A History of the World in 100 Objects – produced to complement the Radio 4 series, this book describes objects which provide a fascinating insight into many historical cultures around the world.
Charlotte Mullins A Little History of Art – an extraordinary journey through 100,000 years of art’s crucial place in understanding our collective culture and history.
Grayson Perry Playing to the Gallery: Helping Contemporary Art in its Struggle to Be Understood – based on his hugely popular BBC Radio 4 Reith Lectures, this funny, personal journey through the art world answers the basic questions that might occur to us in an art gallery but seem too embarrassing to ask.
Matthew Rice Rice’s Language of Buildings – this beautifully illustrated book covers the grammar and vocabulary of British buildings, explaining the evolution of style from Norman castles to Norman Foster.
Michael Squire
The Art of the Body – grapples with the legacy of the classical nude by exploring its complex relationship with subsequent western depictions, and shows how Graeco-Roman images inhabit our world as if they were our own. There are a series of comparative and thematic accounts which demonstrate the range of cultural ideas and and anxieties that were explored through the figure of the body, both in antiquity and afterwards.
Suggestions from the Business Department
Brad Stone
Duncan Clark
Bill Gates
The Everything Store; Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon – the definitive story of Amazon.com, one of the most successful companies in the world and of its driven, brilliant founder, Jeff Bezos.
Alibaba: The House that Jack Ma Built – in just a decade and half, Jack Ma, a man from modest beginnings who started out as an English teacher, founded Alibaba and built it into one of the world’s largest companies, an e-commerce empire on which hundreds of millions of Chinese consumers depend.
How to Avoid a Climate Disaster – In this urgent, authoritative book, Bill Gates sets out a wide-ranging, practical - and accessible - plan for how the world can get to zero greenhouse gas emissions in time to avoid a climate
S & B Hashemi
catastrophe. Bill Gates has spent a decade investigating the causes and effects of climate change. With the help of experts in the fields of physics, chemistry, biology, engineering, political science, and finance, he has focused on what must be done in order to stop the planet's slide toward certain environmental disaster.
Anyone Can Do It: Building Coffee Republic From Our Kitchen Table: 57 Real-life Laws on entrepreneurship – a fantastic introduction to business; Sahar Hashemi and her brother Bobby gave up professional jobs to follow their dream to build the best coffee shop chain in Britain. This book is like one long case study that covers much of the AS course material including risk, entrepreneurship and business structure in a very easy to read format
Innocent A Book About Innocent: Our Story and Some Things We've Learned –Richard Reed, Jon Wright and Adam Balon met at Cambridge, found “proper jobs” after graduating but fostered a desire to start a business together. This book charts their progress from starting the business in 1999 and selling twenty-four bottles a day to the millions they now sell every week.
Walter Isaacson
Steve Jobs – tells the story of the rollercoaster life and intense personality of this creative entrepreneur whose passion for perfection and ferocious drive revolutionised six industries –personal computers, animated movies, music, phones, tablet computing and digital publishing.
Anita Roddick Body and Soul: Profits with Principles - The Amazing Success Story of Anita Roddick & The Body Shop – controversial businesswoman and environmentalist Roddick, creator of The Body Shop (located in England, America, and 36 other countries), tells her amazing success story and explains her philosophy of commerce with a conscience.
Suggestions from the Drama Department
Plays / Reference
Edward Braun The Director and the Stage – an opportunity to explore a variety of directing strategies and how to go about collaboration with others. (UVI)
Caryl Churchill Top Girls – Arguably Churchill's most well-known play, Top Girls directly engages with Thatcherism and the role of women in modern society; what does it mean and what does it take for a woman to succeed?
Federico Garcia Lorca Blood Wedding – one of Lorca's most famous plays that explores the role of women in society. An excellent addition to the A Level text Yerma. (UVI)
Graham & Hoggett The Frantic Assembly Book of Devising Theatre – an absolute must read for anyone exploring Frantic Assemby's techniques and the way they go about creating theatre. (LVI)
Jonathan Harvey
Beautiful Thing – a post war play set on a council estate that explores the intricate range of emotional relationships and stories of three households (LVI) EDI
Duncan Macmillan
Nick Payne
Lungs – a modern play that follows a young couple as they consider parenthood. Macmillan's writing style makes for an interesting read. (LVI)
Constellations – a fascinating play that explores the concept of relationships within quantum mutiverse theory. (UVI)
Mark Ravenhill The Cane – a disturbing modern play that examines society and its relationship with power abuse. (UVI)
Redcape Theatre
The Idiot Colony – a physical theatre piece that is based on the research of real life stories. This play explores the stories of women committed to mental institutions in the 1940s and 1950s. (LVI)
Richard Schechner Performance Studies
Liz Tomplin
British Theatre Companies 1995 – 2014 – an excellent overview of modern theatrical companies that will support your research of theatre practitioners. (LVI)
Recommendations from the Economics Department
Dan Ariely
Dr Linda Yueh
Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions - why can a 50p aspirin do what a 5p one can’t? If an item is ‘free’, it must be a bargain, right? Smart people make irrational decisions every day and the behavioural economist Dan Ariely cuts to the heart of this strange behaviour
Great Economists: How Their Ideas Can Help Us Today – a new book from a leading economist with her perspectives on contemporary issues. Linda Yueh is a Fellow in Economics at St Edmund Hall, University of Oxford, adjunct Professor of Economics at London Business School, and visiting professor at LSE. Dr. Yueh has been an advisor to, among others, the World Economic Forum in Davos, the World Bank, the European Commission, and the Asian Development Bank.
Victoria Bateman
Prof. Diane Coyle
The Sex Factor: How Woman Made the West Rich – why did the West become so rich? Why is inequality rising? How ‘free’ should markets be? And what does sex have to do with it? In this passionate and skilfully argued book, leading feminist Victoria Bateman (a Fellow in Economics and Director of Studies for the Economics Tripos at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge) shows how we can only understand the burning economic issues of our time if we put sex and gender - 'the sex factor' - at the heart of the picture. Bateman tells a bold story about how the status and freedom of women are central to our prosperity. EDI
GDP: A Brief but Affectionate History – a really good look on the GDP / well-being debate. Why did the size of the U.S. economy increase by 3 percent on one day in mid-2013 or Ghana's balloon by 60 percent overnight in 2010? Why did the U.K. financial industry show its fastest expansion ever at the end of 2008 just as the world's financial system went into meltdown? And why was Greece's chief statistician charged with treason in 2013 for apparently doing nothing more than trying to accurately report the size of his country's economy?
Tim Harford Fifty Things that Made the Modern Economy – who thought up paper money? How did the contraceptive pill change the face of the legal profession? Why was the horse collar as important for human progress as the steam engine? The world economy defies comprehension. It delivers astonishing luxury to some and leaves hundreds of millions behind, puts tremendous strains on the ecosystem and has an alarming habit of stalling. Nobody is in charge of it.
Robert T. Kiyosaki Rich Dad, Poor Dad – explodes the myth that you need to earn a high income to be rich and explains the difference between working for money and having your money work for you.
Kate Raworth
Doughnut Economics: Seven Ways to Think Like a 21st-Century Economist – in Doughnut Economics, Oxford academic Kate Raworth identifies the seven critical ways in which mainstream economics has led us astray - from selling us the myth of 'rational economic man' to obsessing over growth at all costsand offers instead an alternative roadmap for bringing humanity into a sweet spot that meets the needs of all within the means of the planet. Ambitious, radical and thoughtful, she offers a new, cutting-edge economic model fit for the challenges of the 21st century.
Prof. Joseph Stiglitz The Great Divide – one of the classic critiques of globalisation
Dambisa Moyo Dead Aid: Why aid is not working and how there is another way for Africa –“We all want to help. Over the past fifty years $1 trillion of development aid has flowed from Western governments to Africa, with rock stars and actors campaigning for more. But this has not helped Africa. It has ruined it.”
Dambisa Moyo How the West Was Lost: Fifty Years of Economic Folly - and the Stark Choices Ahead.
Dambisa Moyo Winner Take All: China's Race for Resources and What It Means for the World
Some excellent videos to watch about the ideas of Dambisa Moyo: https://www.ted.com/talks/dambisa_moyo_is_china_the_new_idol_for_emerging_economies https://www.ted.com/speakers/dambisa_moyo
BBC “Hard Talk”
http://estream.downehouse.net/View.aspx?id=12196~5g~7ONfMRONdz http://estream.downehouse.net/View.aspx?id=12197~5h~zBbEwQ8XBB
“Dambisa Moyo makes a compelling case for a new approach in Africa. Her message is that 'Africa's time is now': It is time for Africans to assume full control over their economic and political destiny. Africans should grasp the many means and opportunities available to them for improving the quality of life.” Kofi Annan, former UN Secretary-General
Dambisa Moyo worked at Goldman Sachs for eight years, having previously worked for the World Bank as a consultant. Dambisa completed a PhD in Economics at Oxford University, and holds a Masters from Harvard University Kennedy School of Government. She was born and raised in Lusaka, Zambia.
Dambisa Moyo
Edge of Chaos – sets out the new political and economic challenges facing the world, and the specific, radical solutions needed to resolve these issues and reignite global growth. Dambisa enumerates the four headwinds of demographicsinequality, commodity scarcity and technological innovation that are driving social and economic unrest and argues for a fundamental retooling of democratic capitalism to address current problems and deliver better outcomes in the future.
Amartya Sen Development as Freedom – Amartya Sen explains how, in a world of unprecedented increase in overall opulence, millions of people living in the Third World are still unfree. Even if they are not technically slaves, they are denied elementary freedoms and remain imprisoned in one way or another by economic poverty, social deprivation, political tyranny or cultural authoritarianism. The main purpose of development is to spread freedom and its 'thousand charms' to the unfree citizens.
Prof. Paul Collier
Prof. Paul Collier
Plundered Planet: How to Reconcile Prosperity with Nature – development classic
The Bottom Billion – in this elegant and impassioned synthesis from one of the world's leading experts on Africa and poverty, economist writes persuasively that although nearly five billion of the world's people are beginning to climb from desperate poverty and to benefit from globalization's reach to developing countries, there is a "bottom billion" of the world's poor whose countries, largely immune to the forces of global economy, are falling farther behind and are in danger of falling apart, separating permanently and tragically from the rest of the world.
https://www.ted.com/talks/paul_collier_shares_4_ways_to_help_the_bottom_billion?l anguage=en
Abijhit Banerjee & Esther Duflo
Ha-Joon Chang
Poor Economics: Barefoot Hedge-fund Managers, DIY Doctors and the Surprising Truth about Life on less than $1 a Day – this eye-opening book overturns the myths about what it is like to live on very little, revealing the unexpected decisions that millions of people make every day. It looks at some of the most paradoxical aspects of life below the poverty line - why the poor need to borrow in order to save, why incentives that seem effective to us may not be for them, and why, despite being more risk-taking than high financiers, they start businesses but rarely grow them.
23 Things They Don't Tell You About Capitalism – in this revelatory book, Ha-Joon Chang destroys the biggest myths of our times and shows us an alternative view of the world, including:
• There's no such thing as a 'free' market
• Globalization isn't making the world richer
Ha-Joon Chang
• We don't live in a digital world - the washing machine has changed lives more than the internet
• Poor countries are more entrepreneurial than rich ones
Economics: The User's Guide – What is economics? What can and can't it explain about the world? Why does it matter?
Michael J Sandel What Money Can’t Buy: the Moral Limits of Markets – should we financially reward children for good marks? Is it ethical to pay people to donate organs? What about hiring mercenaries to fight our wars, outsourcing inmates to for-profit prisons or selling citizenship? In recent decades, market values have impinged on almost every aspect of life - medicine, education, government, law, even family life. We have drifted from having a market economy to being a market society. In What Money Can't Buy, Michael Sandel asks: Isn't there something wrong with a world in which everything is for sale? And how do we protect the things that really matter?
Richard Thaler Misbehaving: The Making of Behavioural Economics –traditional economics assumes that rational forces shape everything. Behavioural economics knows better. Richard Thaler has spent his career studying the notion that humans are central to the economy - and that we're error-prone individuals, not Spock-like automatons. Now behavioural economics is hugely influential, changing the way we think not just about money, but about ourselves, our world and all kinds of everyday decisions. Whether buying an alarm clock, selling football tickets, or applying for a mortgage, we all succumb to biases and make decisions that deviate from the standards of rationality assumed by economists. In other words, we misbehave.
David Halpern Inside the Nudge Unit – life changing lessons from the government’s Behavioural Insight Team (BIT) or ‘Nudge Unit’, the unconventional multimillion pound saving initiative that makes a big difference through influencing small, simple changes in human behaviour.
Paul Krugman End This Depression Now – Krugman pursues economic questions with his characteristic lucidity and insight. He has a powerful message for anyone who has suffered during recession years - a quick, strong recovery is just one step away, if our leaders can find the "intellectual clarity and political will" to end this depression now.
T. Picketty (2014) Capital in the Twenty First Century – this large book of almost 700 pages is well worth skimming through as it may well become one of the most influential economics books of the next decade. Picketty’s basic thesis is that there is a tendency for returns on capital to exceed the rate of economic growth, threatening to generate extreme inequalities that stir discontent and undermine democratic values.
R. Solow (2014) Economics for the Curious – short chapters, each exploring an aspect of the work of a different Economics Nobel Prize winner.
Brad Stone The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon – Jeff Bezos stands out for his relentless pursuit of new markets, leading Amazon into risky new ventures like the Kindle and cloud computing, and transforming retail in the same way that Henry Ford revolutionised manufacturing. Amazon
placed one of the first and largest bets on the internet. Nothing would ever be the same again.
Brad Stone The Upstarts: Uber, Airbnb and the Battle for the New Silicon Valley: How Uber, Airbnb, and the Killer Companies of the New Silicon Valley are Changing the World – ten years ago, the idea of getting into a stranger’s car, or walking into a stranger’s home, would have seemed bizarre and dangerous, but today it’s as common as ordering a book online. Uber and Airbnb are household names: redefining neighbourhoods, challenging the way governments regulate business and changing the way we travel.
https://www.ted.com/talks/travis_kalanick_uber_s_plan_to_get_more_people_into_fewer_cars
Suggestions from the English Department Poetry
Allie Esiri (ed.) A Poem for Every Day of the Year – a lovely way to widen your poetry reading in this beautiful book that collates a huge range of poetry covering a wide range of periods and topics.
James Fenton (ed.) The Faber Book of Love Poems – a collection of love poetry that will support and develop those studied at A Level. Also a favourite spot for the chief examiner to find poems for the unseen poetry exam question!
Andrea Hodgson The Cambridge Guide to Reading Poetry – a useful guide to how to approach and read poetry that will support and deepen your understanding of poetry analysis.
Plays
Peter Ackroyd Shakepeare: The Biography – an accessible and fascinating biography of Shakespeare written by a writer about a writer. It gives detailed insights into the world Shakespeare inhabited.
Henrik Ibsen A Doll’s House – Ibsen’s plays often have extraordinary female characters, and this is no exception. The play focuses on a woman trying to find self-fulfilment in a male-dominated world.
Christopher Marlowe Doctor Faustus – a contemporary of Shakespeare, Marlowe explores what it is to be evil and the temptations offered by knowledge and wealth.
Oscar Wilde The Importance of Being Earnest – one of Wilde’s most enjoyable comedies, Jack Worthing looks for the truth about his birth after being found in ‘a handbag’.
Tennessee Williams The Glass Menagerie – this beautiful and tragic memory play set in St Louis in 1937, explores the life of Tom, his mother and his sister Laura who keeps
a ‘glass menagerie’ of animal figurines which come to represent the fragility, tragedy and beauty of their owner.
W Shakespeare Hamlet and Macbeth – two of Shakespeare’s greatest tragedies and useful comparisons with Othello Enjoy Shakespeare’s masterful creation of two tragic heroes.
Prose
George Orwell 1984 – arguably the most famous dystopian novel, 1984 tells the story of Winston who lives on Airstrip One under a totalitarian government known as ‘The Party’ and their mysterious leader ‘Big Brother’ who is always ‘watching you’.
Aldous Huxley Brave New World – set in 2540CE, Huxley’s novel presents a nightmarish society where everyone is always happy; thanks to cloning, governmentissued drugs and pre-conditioned societal classes.
Anne Bronte The Tenant of Wildfell Hall – this novel follows the story of Helen who creates a new identity to escape domestic abuse.
Charlotte Bronte Jane Eyre – a wonderfully Gothic read, this novel follows Jane through her life from childhood to the home of the mysterious Mr Rochester and his house, Thornfield Hall, which holds shocking secrets.
Other
Mark Forsyth Elements of Eloquence – an extremely enjoyable dive into the various elements of classical rhetoric and how these are used by writers throughout history, with a particular focus on Shakespeare.
Recommendations from the Geography Department
Paul Collier The Bottom Billion: Why the Poorest Countries are Failing and What Can Be Done About It – Collier identifies and explains the four traps that prevent the world’s poorest billion people from growing and receiving the benefits of globalisation. Collier argues that we cannot take a ‘headless heart’ approach to these seemingly intractable problems; rather that we must harness our moral outrage to come to a reasoned and thorough understanding of the complex and interconnected problems that are faced by the world’s poor.
Matthew Green Shadowlands: A Journey Through Lost Britain – Britain’s landscape is scarred with haunting and romantic remains –shadowlands that were once filled with life but are now just spectral echoes. Peering through the cracks of history, we find Dunwich, a medieval city plunged off a Suffolk cliff by sea storms and the ghostly reservoir that is Capel Celyn, a solely Welshspeaking village drowned by Liverpool City Council.
Tim Marshall
Dambisa Moyo
Divided – every story has two sides and so does every wall. We’re in a new era of tribalism and the barricades are going up. Money, race, religion, politics: these are the things that divide us. Trump’s wall says as much about America’s divided past as it does about the future; the Great Wall of China separates ‘us’ from ‘them’; in Europe, the explosive combination of politics and migration threatens liberal democracy itself. Marshall delves into our past and our present to reveal the fault lines that will shape our world for years to come.
Dead Aid: Why aid is not working and how there is another way for Africa – we all want to help. Over the past fifty years $1 trillion of development aid has flowed from Western governments to Africa, with rock stars and actors campaigning for more. But this has not helped Africa. It has ruined it. Dead Aid shows us another way. Using hard evidence to illustrate her case, Moyo shows how, with access to capital and with the right policies, even the poorest nations can turn themselves around. First, we must destroy the myth that aid works - and make charity history.
Fred Pearce A Trillion Trees – trees keep our planet cool and breathable. They make the rain and sustain biodiversity. And yet we are cutting and burning them at such a rate that many forests will soon reach a tipping point beyond which they will shrivel and die. But there is still time and there is still hope.
Hans Rosling Factfulness: Ten Reasons Why We’re Wrong About the World – and Why Things are Better Than You Think – an international bestseller, inspiring and revelatory, filled with lively anecdotes and moving stories, Factfulness is an urgent and essential book that will change the way you see the world and make you realise that things are better than you thought.
Recommendations from the History Department
E.Foley & B.Coates What would Boudicca Do? Everyday Problems Solved by History’s Most Remarkable Women – an inspiring book which covers the diverse and turbulent lives of figures such as Frida Kahlo, Josephine Baker, Cleopatra and Empress Cixi. EDI
Hakim Adi Black British History: New Perspectives – a collection of essays from both established and emerging scholars of Black British history An invaluable resource for both future scholarship and those looking for a useful introduction to Black British history. EDI
David Olusoga Black and British: A Forgotten History – historian and broadcaster David Olusoga tells the rich and revealing story of the long relationship between the British Isles and the people of Africa and the Caribbean. EDI
Sathnam Sanghera Empireland: How Imperialism Has Shaped Modern Britain – the British Empire ran for centuries and covered vast swathes of the world. It is, as Sanghera reveals, fundamental to our understanding Britain. At a time of great division, when we are arguing about what it means to be British, Sanghera urges us to step back and see where we came from, so that we can then begin to understand who we are and what unites us. EDI
Shashi Tharoor
China
Inglorious Empire – It stacks up the arguments in a most compelling manner and is a relatively easy read for anyone interested in Empire. EDI
Tania Branigan Red Memory – first-hand accounts of the horror of the Cultural Revolution.
Jung Chang Wild Swans – the classic autobiographical account of three generations of Chinese women living through the turmoil of the twentieth century. EDI
Barbara Demick Eat the Buddha – the Tibetan tragedy as it played out in one town on the edge of the Tibetan plateau.
Frank Dikötter The Tragedy of Liberation, Mao’s Great Famine and The Cultural Revolution – this trilogy encompasses the latest research on some of the key events in Mao’s rule of China, in an engaging and readable way.
Frank Dikötter China after Mao – the author turns his attention to the period since 1976.
Tudor England
Lisa Hilton Elizabeth – Renaissance Prince – a recent and very readable biography of Elizabeth I. This will provide a clear insight into recent interpretations of Elizabeth and facilitate with other views that the course will throw up.
D. McCulloch
Tudor Church Militant - Edward VI and the Protestant Reformation – this recent publication reminds of the significance of Edward’s reign and makes a persuasive case for the centrality of the ‘boy-king’ within it.
Thomas Penn Winter King: the Dawn of Tudor England – this book provides a good summary of the reign of Henry VII and a recent interpretation of the difficulties experienced by Henry throughout his reign.
Kate Williams Rival Queens – Elizabeth and Mary shared the struggle to be both woman and queen. But the forces rising against the two regnants, and the conflicts of love and dynasty, drove them apart.
Lucy Wooding Henry VIII – the best recent biography of our most famous king.
NEA
Christopher Tyerman The World of the Crusades – a well-written and well-illustrated recent history of the Crusades.
Dan Jones Crusaders – an accessible account of the Crusades through the eyes of those who experienced them.
Katherine Pangonis Queens of Jerusalem – a history of the Crusader States through the eyes of the women who ruled them. EDI
Matthew Carr
Blood and faith: the purging of Muslim Spain – a lively account of sixteenth-century Spain
Giles Tremlett
Isabella of Castille – the life of one of the most powerful women in the late Middle Ages. EDI
Recommendations from the Maths Department
Lara Alcock
Alex Bellos
How to Study for a Maths Degree – every year, thousands of students go to university to study mathematics (single honours or combined with another subject). Many of these students are extremely intelligent and hardworking, but even the best will, at some point, struggle with the demands of making the transition to advanced mathematics. These changes need not be mysterious - mathematics education research has revealed many insights into the adjustments that are necessary - but they are not obvious and they do need explaining. This no-nonsense book translates these research-based insights into practical advice for a student audience.
Here’s Looking at Euclid – too often, maths gets characterized as dry and difficult. Alex Bellos says, "math can be inspiring and brilliantly creative. Mathematical thought is one of the great achievements of the human race, and arguably the foundation of all human progress. The world of mathematics is a remarkable place." Bellos has travelled all around the globe and has plunged into history to uncover fascinating stories of mathematical achievement, from the breakthroughs of Euclid, the greatest mathematician of all time, to the creations of the Zen master of origami, one of the hottest areas of mathematical work today.
Larry Gonick & Woollcott Smith
Robert Kanigel
The Cartoon Guide to Statistics – The Cartoon Guide to Statistics covers all the central central ideas of modern statistics: the summary and display of data, probability in gambling and medicine, random variables, Bernoulli Trials, the Central Limit Theorem, hypothesis testing, confidence interval estimation, and much more all explained in simple, clear, and yes, funny illustrations. Never again will you order the Poisson Distribution in a French restaurant!
The Man Who Knew Infinity – in 1913, a young unschooled Indian clerk wrote a letter to G H Hardy, begging the preeminent English mathematician's opinion on several ideas he had about numbers. Realising the letter was the work of a genius, Hardy arranged for Srinivasa Ramanujan to come to England. Thus began one of the most improbable and productive collaborations ever chronicled.
Joseph Mazur Euclid in the Rainforest: Discovering Universal Truth in Logic and Math –Euclid in the Rainforest combines the literary with the mathematical to explore logic, the one indispensable tool in man’s quest to understand the world. Through adventure stories and historical narratives populated with a rich and quirky cast of characters, Mazur artfully reveals the less-thanairtight nature of logic and the muddled relationship between maths and the real world.
Leonard Mlodinow The Drunkard’s Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives –randomness and uncertainty surround everything we do, so why are we so bad at
Jennifer Ouellette
understanding them? The same tools that help us understand the random paths ofmolecules canbeapplied to the randomnessthatgoverns so many aspects of our everyday lives, from winning the lottery to road safety, and reveals the truth about the success of sporting heroes and film stars, and even how to make sense of a blood test.
The Calculus Diaries – Jennifer Ouellette never took maths in college, mostly because she, like most people, assumed that she would not need it in real life. But then the English-majorturned-award-winning-science-writer had a change of heart and decided to revisit the equations and formulas that had haunted her for years. The Calculus Diaries is the fun and fascinating account of her year spent confronting her maths phobia head on.
Thomas Povey Professor Povey’s Perplexing Problems – Thomas Povey shares 109 of his favourite problems in physics and maths. The puzzles, he says, are like toys. We should pick up the one we most enjoy and play with it.
The Stanford Mathematics Problem Book – This volume features a complete set of problems, hints, and solutions based on Stanford University's well-known competitive examination in mathematics. Filled with rigorous problems, it assists students in developing and cultivating their logic and probability skills.
Grant Sanderson 3Blue1Brown – a YouTube channel with a supporting website of mathematical exploration across a range of topics. Accessible to A Level students, the combination of the fascinating topics and slick animations are enchanting! 3Blue1Brown–YouTube
Marcus du Sautoy Finding Moonshine: a Mathematician’s Journey Through Symmetry – this book from the author of 'The Music of the Primes' combines a personal insight into the mind of a working mathematician with the story of one of the biggest adventures in mathematics: the search for symmetry. This is the story of how humankind has come to its understanding of the bizarre world of symmetry – a subject of fundamental significance to the way we interpret the world around us.
Karl Sigmund Games of Life: Explorations in Ecology, Evolution and Behaviour – life is often a matter of gambles, pay-offs, and trade-offs, just like a game. This book takes readers on a tour through the games and computer simulations that are actually helping to advance knowledge in such fields as ecology, evolution, and animal behaviour. It starts with artificial life and selfreplicating automata, a topic ideally suited for a computer-games approach. The book goes on to study pursuit games between predators and prey, and chaotic motion and its role in ecology. Games of chance and statistical paradoxes illuminate the randomness in molecular evolution, while some bizarre double games played by chromosomes help explain the laws of population genetics.
Francis Spufford Backroom Boys – a brilliant, beautiful account of how British boffins triumphed across the decades in creating everything from computer games to Martian landers. The book contains chapters on the Beagle II, Elite - the 80s computer game, the Blue Streak missile, Concorde, mobile phone technology and the Human Genome Project, among others. Above all, it is a celebration of big dreams achieved with slender means.
Ian Stewart
Seventeen Equations That Changed the World – from Newton's Law of Gravity to the Black-Scholes model used by bankers to predict the markets, equations are everywhere - and they are fundamental to everyday life. Seventeen Equations that Changed the World examines seventeen ground-breaking equations that have altered the course of human history. He explores how Pythagoras's Theorem led to GPS and Satnav; how logarithms are applied in architecture; why imaginary numbers were important in the development of the digital camera, and what is really going on with Schrödinger's cat.
Steven Strogatz The Joy of X: A Guided Tour of Mathematics from One to Infinity – Maths is everywhere, often where we do not even realise. Award-winning professor, Steven Strogatz, acts as our guide as he takes us on a tour of numbers that - unbeknownst to the uninitiated - connect pop culture, literature, art, philosophy, current affairs, business and even everyday life. In The Joy of X, Strogatz explains the great ideas of maths - from negative numbers to calculus, fat tails to infinity - with clarity, wit and insight.
Robin J Wilson Four Colours Suffice: How the Map Problem was Solved – the four-colour theorem states that every map in the world can be coloured with just four colours in such a way that neighbouring countries have different colours. One of the simplest problems to state, one of the hardest to solve, which took a century for mathematicians to prove. This book introduces the mathematicians behind the mathematics, among them a bishop, an astronomer, a botanist, an obsessive golfer and a bridegroom who spent his honeymoon colouring maps.
Recommendations from the Modern Languages Department
Albert Camus La Peste – the story of a plague sweeping the French Algerian city of Oran. It asks a number of questions relating to the nature of destiny and the human condition.
Delphine de Vigan No et Moi – a perceptive and moving story of the friendship between the heroine, a precociously intelligent 13-year-old and the homeless girl she befriends.
Romain Gary La Vie Devant Soi – a beautiful and moving story of love, coming of age and courage in the heart of a diverse Parisian underworld community through the eyes of a child. Brilliant and unforgettable.
Faiza Guène Kiffe Kiffe Demain – a warm and uplifting story of a modern, secondgeneration French Moroccan teenager. A funny and insightful tale of the everyday life and concerns of a 15- year-old, living with her mum in a Paris HLM suburb.
Françoise Sagan
Bonjour Tristesse – a novella that scandalized 1950s France with its portrayal of teenager terrible Cécile, a heroine who rejects conventional notions of love, marriage and responsibility to choose her own sexual freedom.
Paolo Cognette Le Otto Montagne – a modern Italian masterpiece, The Eight Mountains is a lyrical coming-of-age story about the power of male friendships and the enduring bond between fathers and sons.
Patrick Süskind Das Parfum – following the journey of a boy with an exquisite sense of smell which drives him to gruesome deeds, Süskind’s novel transports you back to 18th century France, and the sprawling, stinking city of Paris. A big international success.
Laura Esquivel
Niccolo Ammaniti
Como Agua Para Chocolate – each chapter is titled for a month of the year and then kicks off with a new Mexican recipe; learn Spanish through culinary immersion! The story itself follows a young Mexican woman, Tita, through her coming of age and her constant struggle to earn her independence from her traditional family.
Io Non Ho Paura – in this immensely powerful, lyrical and skilfully narrated novel, set in southern Italy, nine-year-old Michele discovers a secret so momentous, so terrible, that he daren’t tell anyone about it.
Recommendations from the Music Department
Philip Ball
The Music Instinct: How Music Works and Why We Can’t Do Without It – why have all human cultures – today and throughout history – made music? Why does music excite such rich emotion? How do we make sense of musical sound? These are questions that have, until recently, remained mysterious. This book explores how the latest research in music psychology and brain science is piecing together the puzzle of how our minds understand and respond to music.
Clemmie Burton-Hill Another Year of Wonder – a book that shows, whoever you are and wherever you come from, classical music can be the soundtrack for your everyday life and a reminder that finding a space to sit and listen to a piece of music every day can be a singular gift.
William Caplin
Tanja Crouch
Classical Form: A Theory of Formal Functions for the Instrumental Music of Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven – a leading book in the rapidly-emerging New Formenlehre academic sphere. Building on ideas first advanced by Arnold Schoenberg and later developed by Erwin Ratz, this book introduces a new theory of form for instrumental music in the classical style. The theory provides a broad set of principles and a comprehensive methodology for the analysis of classical form from individual ideas, phrases and themes to the large-scale organisation of complete movements.
100 Careers in the Music Business – the music industry has undergone radical changes in recent years, but abundant career opportunities still exist. Among job opportunities described in this book are artists’ agents and managers, talent agents, sound technicians, film and TV technicians, film and TV production managers, advertising illustrators and copywriters, publicists and many others.
Stuart Isacoff
Temperament: How Music Became the Battleground for the Great Mind –the contentious adoption of the modern tuning system known as ‘equal temperament’ called into question beliefs that had lasted nearly two millennia – and also made possible the music of Beethoven, Schubert,
Aniruddh Patel
Oliver Sacks
Chopin, Debussy and all who followed. A keystone of Western Music that is so significant that it is often almost completely ignored.
Music, Language and the Brain – a fascinating read on the complicated relationship between music and language and its neurophysiological basis. This book traces our understanding of the correlation between music and language back to philosophy of Ancient Greece and provides the latest research on the brain to challenge an assumption that music and language evolved independently of one another.
Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain –‘a humane discourse on the fragility of our minds, of the bodies that give rise to them and of the world they create for us. This book is filled with wonders.’ Daily Telegraph
Recommendations from the Politics Department
Politics
Tony Wright
Richard Valelly
David Miller
H Cole and J Heale
David Goodheart
Caroline Lucas
Jess Phillips
Steve Richards
Anthony Seldon
British Politics – A Very Short Introduction
American Politics – A Very Short Introduction
Political Philosophy – A Very Short Introduction
Tim Shipman
Jon Sopel
Bob Woodward
All of these books provide a good introduction to the various aspects of the Politics Course.
Out of the blue – a very short book about the career of Liz Truss.
The Road to Somewhere – an analysis of recent trends in British society which suggests we are all ‘somewheres’ or ‘anywheres’. Which are you?
Honourable Friends – an insider’s account of the daily life of an MP.
The Life of an MP – another account from a well-known Labour MP.
The Rise of the Outsiders – an interesting analysis of the impact of figures such as Corbyn, Macron and Trump on modern politics.
The Impossible Office? – a history of British Prime Ministers.
Johnson at 10 – an account of three tumultuous years.
Truss at 10 – an account of 49 tumultuous days.
All Out War – an account of the Brexit referendum and its consequences by a journalist at the heart of the action.
A Year at the Circus: Inside Trump’s White House – another exposé of the Trump regime by a distinguished BBC journalist. If Only They Didn’t Speak English – an account of life in Trump’s America by the BBC Washington correspondent.
Fear, Rage and Peril – the famous American journalist turns his attention to the Trump White House in three books.
The following texts will support your understanding of the Political Ideas course:
Edmund Burke Reflections on the Revolution in France
Rachel Carson Silent Spring
Anthony Giddens The Third Way
John Locke Two treatises on government
James Lovelock Gaia
Marx and Engels The Communist Manifesto
JS Mill On Liberty
Ayn Rand Atlas Shrugged and The virtue of selfishness
Read a quality daily newspaper and news journals such as: The Week
The Spectator (more challenging)
New Statesman (more challenging)
Recommendations from the RS Department
Aristotle Ethics – the greatest philosopher who ever lived turns his mind to the question of moral behaviour in the Ancient World
Karen Armstrong History of God – erudite and detailed examination of the idea of God. This is also a DVD if you find the text hard going, but well worth the time spent. Other books include the ‘Case for God’ and ‘Transformation’, which are equally good.
A. J. Ayer
Language, Truth and Logic – classic English exposition of the controversial yet incisive theory of Logical Positivism.
Simon Blackburn The Big Questions: Philosophy – the Big Questions series is designed to let renowned experts confront the 20 most fundamental and frequently asked questions of a major branch of science or philosophy. Each 3000-word essay simply and concisely examines a question that has eternally perplexed enquiring minds and provides answers from history's great thinkers. This ambitious project is a unique distillation of humanity's best ideas.
Boethius The Consolation of Philosophy – the 5th century senator find himself imprisoned and seeking solace Sophia the goddess of wisdom pays a visit. Through their discourse they encounter what appears to be a solution to God’s Omniscience, amongst other problems.
F. C. Coppleston
Aquinas – a neat summary of Thomistic thought, written by one of the great philosophers of the 20th Century.
Paul Davies
Richard Dawkins
Alain de Botton
The Goldilocks Enigma – detailed analysis of how the improbability of the universe’s existence and current state looks engineered. Why is it ‘Just Right’?
The Greatest Show on Earth – Dawkins at his best, showing the remarkable evidence for evolution rather than his poor attempts to philosophise and argue for a fundamentalist atheism, such as in his quite awful ‘God Delusion’.
The Consolations of Philosophy – practical advice to contemporary problems gleaned from the archives of Philosophy. Erudite, thought provoking and readable.
Religion for Atheists – what if religions are neither all true or all nonsense?
The boring debate between fundamentalist believers and non-believers is finally moved on by Alain's inspiring new book, which boldly argues that the supernatural claims of religion are of course entirely false – and yet that religions still have some very important things to teach the secular world.
EDI
Trevor Dennis
Anthony Gottlieb
Viktor Frankl
Speaking of God – Trevor Dennis explores religious themes through a series of stories set in a variety of times and places.
The Dream of Reason and Dream of Enlightenment – one of the most readable books on the History of Philosophy.
Man’s Search for Meaning – Man’s Search for Meaning emerges from the horrors of the Holocaust. Evil and suffering can never extinguish us; hope can be found in the most evil places and times.
Sigmund Freud
Joseph Hannam
C. Hitchen
William James
Nikos Kazantzakis
C. S. Lewis
The Future of An Illusion (German: Die Zukunft einer Illusion) - is a 1927 book by Sigmund Freud, describing his interpretation of religion's origins, development, psychoanalysis and its future. Freud viewed religion as a false belief system.
God’s Philosophers – brilliant revisionist exposition of the myth that Science was opposed to Religion and arose from the Enlightenment once medieval religion had lost its grip. Hannam shows conclusively that modern science can be clearly traced back to Monastic Scholasticism.
The Portable Atheist – short essays and extracts on a variety of theological and philosophical topics ranging from Lucretius to Ayaan Hirsi Ali selected and with introductions by Christopher Hitchens.
The Variety of Religious Experiences – the classic study of William James’ phenomenological study into the nature of Religious Experience.
The Last Temptation – Jesus’s crucifixion reimagined by this Greek philosopher and writer.
The Screwtape Letters – Lewis is a classic masterpiece of religious satire that entertains readers with its sly and ironic portrayal of human life and foibles from the vantage point of Screwtape, a highly placed assistant to "Our Father Below." At once wildly comic, deadly serious, and strikingly original, C.S. Lewis's The Screwtape Letters is the most engaging account of temptation and triumph over it ever written.
Mary Midgley The Solitary Self – Downe House’s own Philosopher! Renowned philosopher Mary Midgley explores the nature of our moral constitution to challenge the view that reduces human motivation to self-interest. Midgley argues cogently and convincingly that simple, one-sided accounts of human motives, such as the 'selfish gene' tendency in recent neoDarwinian thought, may be illuminating but are always unrealistic. Such neatness, she shows, cannot be imposed on human psychology. One of many books by Midgley which show the barrenness of reductionism.
Are You an Illusion? – Mary Midgley, in her most recent work, tackles philosophical reductionism of the person to argue that the subjective self, held by materialists and many scientists to be nothing more than the mere physical and therefore an illusion or a delusion, is far from dead.
Thomas Nagel What does it all mean? – useful and short introduction to Philosophical Ideas and Thought
Plato The Republic – the Perfect State in Plato’s eyes. In the Republic, Plato expounds his theory of the cave, the idea which has been much repeated: The perceived world is only a shadow of the real world. Plato deals as well with ideas such as democracy and education.
Bertrand Russell The Problems of Philosophy – classic exposition of empirical philosophy arrived at from an examination of philosophical problems. Is there such a thing as a permanent object? A must read for those thinking of reading Philosophy at university.
Peter Vardy Kierkegaard – readable introduction on the founder of existentialism.
R S Woolhouse The Empiricists – an accessible introduction to the most significant 17th and 18th Century Empiricists.
Recommendations from the PE Department
Eniola Aluko They Don’t Teach This – steps beyond the realms of memoir to explore themes of dual nationality and identity, race and institutional prejudice, success, failure and faith. It is an inspiring manifesto to change the way readers and the future generation choose to view the challenges that come in their life, applying lessons with raw truths of Eni’s own personal experience. EDI
Daniel Coyle
David Epstein
The Talent Code – what is the secret of talent? How do we unlock it? In this groundbreaking work, journalist and New York Times bestselling author Daniel Coyle provides parents, teachers, coaches and businesspeople –and everyone else- with tools they can use to maximise the potential in themselves and others.
The Sports Gene: Inside the Science of Extraordinary Athletic Performance – explores the effects of genetics and training on human athleticism.
Tim S.Grover Relentless: From Good to Great to Unstoppable – Grover is a renowned sports trainer who reveals the mindset and strategies of the world’s most relentless athletes and achievers. He challenges readers to push past their limits and achieve their full potential.
Phil Jackson
Eleven Rings: The Soul of Success – Phil Jackson was the head coach of the Chicago Bulls and Los Angeles Lakers Eleven Rings explores his methods of motivation and highlights a holistic approach to life that can inspire others
Suzanne Wrack A Woman’s Game: The Rise, Fall and Rise Again of Women’s Football – the astonishing history of women’s football: from the game’s first appearance in England in the late nineteenth century to the incredible teams that, at their height, drew 53,000 spectators to Goodison Park, through to its 50-year ban in the UK and the aftershocks when restrictions were lifted.
Prof Steve Peters
Matthew Syed
The Chimp Paradox – this is an incredibly powerful mind management model that can help you become a happy, confident, healthier and more successful person. Prof Steve Peters explains the struggle that takes place within your mind and then shows how to apply this understanding to every area of your life so you can:
• Recognise how your mind is working
• Understand and manage your emotions and thoughts
• Manage yourself and become the person you would like to be
Black box thinking – this is a new approach to high performance, a means of finding an edge in a complex and fastchanging world. It is not just about sport, but has powerful implications for business and politics, as well as for parents and students. In other words, all of us. Drawing on a dizzying array of case studies and real-world examples, together with cutting-edge research on marginal gains, creativity and grit, Matthew Syed tells the inside story of how success really happens - and how we cannot grow unless we are prepared to learn from our mistakes.
Recommendations from the Science Department
Biology Department
David Beeling
Nessa Carey
Richard Dawkins
The Emerald Planet: How Plants Changed Earth’s History – global warming is difficult to measure, even among the majority of scientists who agree that it is taking place. This book reveals the crucial role that plants have played in determining atmospheric change and how looking at the distant past can help us to predict the future.
The Epigenetics Revolution – at the beginning of this century enormous progress had been made in genetics. The Human Genome Project had finished sequencing human DNA. The cutting-edge of biology, however, is telling us that we still don’t even know all of the questions. It turns out that cells read the genetic code in DNA more like a script to be interpreted than a mould to be replicated. This is epigenetics and Carey reveals the amazing possibilities it offers us all.
The Ancestor’s tale: A Pilgrimage to the Dawn of Evolution – this is a comprehensive look at evolution, ranging from the latest developments in the field to his own provocative views. Dawkins shows us how remarkable we are and how intimate our relationship is with the rest of the living world.
Michael Day Fight for the Tiger: One Man’s Fight to Save the Wild Tiger from Extinction – the story of Michael Day’s campaign to save tigers from extinction which highlights the dangers he faces as he tries to gain evidence of the illegal trade in tiger bones to present to governments.
Giulia Enders Gut: The Inside Story of Our Body’s Most Underrated Organ –this gives the alimentary canal a long-overdue moment in the spotlight. Enders explains the gut’s magic and we learn how the gut’s reactions are intimately connected with our wellbeing.
Henry Gee A (Very) Short History of Life on Earth: 4.6 Billion Years in 12 Chapters –an enlightening story of survival and persistence, highlighting the delicate balance within which life has always existed and continues to exist today. It is our planet as you’ve never seen it before.
Adam Kay This Is Going to Hurt – this is the first-hand account of the life of a junior doctor in all its joy, pain, sacrifice and maddening bureaucracy. Honest, funny, heartbreaking and scary at times, this is everything you wanted to know (and a few you didn’t) - about life on and off a hospital ward.
Alice Roberts Ancestors: A Prehistory of Britain in Seven Burials – using new advances in genetics, Professor Alice Roberts explores the ancestry of Britain through seven burial sites that help us to better understand the human experience that binds us all together.
Oliver Sacks The Man Who Mistook His Wife For a Hat and Other Clinical Tales – Dr Sacks recounts the stories of patients struggling to adapt to the often bizarre worlds of neurological disorder. Here are people who no longer recognise everyday objects or those they love. These brilliant tales illuminate what it mean to be human. EDI
Rebecca Skoots The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks – Henrietta Lacks was a poor Southern tobacco farmer but scientists know her as HeLa. Her cells were taken without her knowledge, grown in culture and are still alive today. They were vital in developing the polio vaccine and have been bought and sold by the billions for scientific research. Skoots uncovers the family history and captures the beauty and drama of scientific discovery, as well as its human consequences. EDI
Chemistry Department
J. Akhaven The Chemistry of explosives
Peter Atkins Four Laws that drive the universe - the laws of thermodynamics drive everything that happens in the universe. From the sudden expansion of a cloud of gas to the cooling of hot metal, and from the unfurling of a leaf to the course of life itself - everything is directed and constrained by four simple laws. They establish fundamental concepts such as temperature and heat and reveal the arrow of time and even the nature of energy itself.
Lewis Dartnell Life in the Universe
John Emsley
Nature’s Building Blocks: An A-Z Guide to the Elements – John Emsley's Nature's Building Blocks was published in paperback in 2003. In this
readable, informative, and fascinating guide to the elements are entries on each of the 100-odd chemical elements, arranged alphabetically from actinium to zirconium. Each entry comprises an explanation of where the element's name comes from, followed by Body element (the role it plays in living things), Element of history (how and when it was discovered), Economic element (what it is used for), Environmental element (where it occurs, how much), Chemical element (facts, figures, and narrative), and Element of surprise (an amazing, little-known fact).
John Farndon The Great Scientists
Peter Wothers Why Chemical reactions happen? – an excellent book to bridge the gap between to A Level and University study. Unlike textbooks, this book draws together the key ideas form various topic areas in an attempt to underpin and explain why chemical reactions occur. A must read for all those wishing to pursue a Chemistry-related degree at University.
TED TALKS
1. Trust, morality and oxytocin
https://www.ted.com/talks/paul_zak_trust_morality_and_oxytocin
2. How we read each other’s minds
https://www.ted.com/talks/rebecca_saxe_how_brains_make_moral_judgments
3. The Science of scent
https://www.ted.com/talks/luca_turin_on_the_science_of_scent
Physics Department
Jim Al Khalili Black holes, Wormholes and Time machines – a really clear and wellwritten description of how General Relativity has completely changed our ideas about space and time.
Cox and Forshaw Why does E = mc2? – the authors delve below the surface to show where Special Relativity came from and how it leads to this remarkable formula.
Paul Davies About Time: Einstein’s Unfinished Revolution – how ancient ideas about time evolved through thinkers such as Newton but were then revolutionised by Einstein. Engagingly written and beautifully put together.
Richard Feynman Six Easy Pieces – Feynman’s undergraduate lectures at Caltech in the early 1960s were recorded and transcribed; here are six of the more straightforward. A unique Physics communicator.
Manjit Kumar
Quantum: Einstein, Bohr and the Great Debate About the Nature of Reality – Manjit Kumar takes us calmly and logically into the centre of the debate about the nature of reality through the middle of the last century. The relationship between Albert Einstein and Neils Bohr is viewed through the light of their different visions of what Physics an and cannot tell us about what reality is.
Carlo Rovelli Reality is not what it seems: The Journey to Quantum Gravity – a truly amazing piece of writing. Rovelli’s poetic interest and his lyricism combine with marvellous elucidations of ancient work, such as that of Democritus and his own work in Loop Quantum Gravity.
Engineering and Materials:
David MacKay Sustainable Energy - Without the Hot Air – if you’ve thrown up your hands in despair thinking there is no solution to the sustainable energy crisis, then read this – an honest, realistic and humorous discussion of all our energy options.
Henry Petroski Invention by Design: How Engineers Get From Thought to Thing – a delve into the mystery of invention, to explore what everyday artefacts and sophisticated networks can reveal about the way engineers solve problems.
J. E. Gordon Structures: Or Why Things Don't Fall Down – for anyone who has wondered why suspension bridges don’t collapse or how dams hold back thousands of gallons of water, Gordon strips engineering of its confusing technical terms and communicates its founding principles in accessible, witty prose
Mark Miodownik Stuff Matters – Exploring the Marvellous Materials that Shape Our Man-made World – from the tea cup to the jet engine, the silicon chip to the paper clip, everything is made of something. Miodownik will inspire amazement and delight at mankind’s creativity.
Robert Pirsig Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance – one of the most influential books written in the past half-century, this is a powerful examination of how we live and a meditation on how to live better.
