Antony Hewish doesn’t like reading about work – so pulsars, which he co-discovered with graduate student Jocelyn Bell, are out. He prefers travel writing, particularly William Dalrymple. Favourites include Dalrymple’s “hilarious” accounts of India, The Age of Kali (Lonely Planet, 2000) and In Xanadu (Flamingo, 1999).
Closer to home, Hewish likes to read John Polkinghorne, the Cambridge theoretical physicist and cleric who writes popular books on science and Christian belief, such as Belief in God in an Age of Science (Yale, 1999). He also liked Letters and Papers from Prison by Dietrich Bonhoeffer (Touchstone, 1997), the Lutheran pastor whose faith…
