Good, bad and ugly

Anthologies of science writing can be a bit contrived: all the people who got
it right assembled tidily in a triumphant, historical progression. Shaking up
the mix, editor Edmund Blair Bolles allows the failures, the interesting and the
quirky to have their say alongside the great and the good. In Galileo’s
Commandment, you’ll find Herodotus getting the structure of the Nile basin
gloriously wrong, Isaac Asimov on death in the labs and Voltaire’s wonderful
reading of Newton. A treat, this is now out in paperback from Abacus,
£9.99, ISBN 0349112460.