Matthew Cobb is a scientist and writer who lives in Manchester, UK. He spent most of his adult life living in Paris, where he worked as a scientist and spent a great deal of time active in far-left politics. He writes regularly on science and historical issues for the LA Times and the Times Literary Supplement and is the author of The Egg and Sperm Race and The Resistance.
My favourite books of the decade are:
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Why Evolution Is True by Jerry Coyne
This is a masterly summary of the evidence for evolution by natural selection, written in a simple, direct style that can be understood by anybody. Jerry Coyne is one of the world's leading evolutionary biologists, who has made major contributions to our understanding of evolution. This popular account is, however, probably his most important and influential piece of work. Everybody should read it.
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Radical Enlightenment - Philosophy and the Making of Modernity, 1650-1750 by Jonathan I. Israel
A massive, sweeping investigation of the nature of modern thought, which traces the roots of the Enlightenment back into the 17th century. Focused on the work of the Dutch philosopher Spinoza, Israel's book is a fascinating exploration of the mixture of philosophy and science that exploded in the Dutch Republic and continues to influence the way we view the world.
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The Scar by China Miéville
Miéville's imagination takes you on a truly fantastic voyage, peopled with strange creatures all of whom behave in oddly human ways. Without a trace of exaggeration, Miéville has conjured up some of the most memorable creations since Homer. Genuinely escapist fiction, with a beating humanist heart.
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Roger Crowley was born in 1951 and educated at Cambridge University. As the child of a naval family, early experiences of life in Malta gave him a deep interest in the history and culture of the Mediterranean world. After university the Mediterranean bug took a more serious turn with a year spent on and off teaching English in Istanbul, exploring the city and walking across Anatolia with friends and donkeys. In recent years he has made return trips to the Greek-speaking world, including two visits to Mount Athos, spiritual home of the Byzantine tradition.
My favourite books of the decade are:
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Waterlog by Roger Deakin
Roger Deakin's year of wild swimming his way across the rivers, lakes, mountain pools and seas of Britian is a completely original blend of natural and social history, travel writing, autobiography and free thinking. A marvellous reinvention of place and possibilities - enough to make you head straight for the nearest water hole.
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The Crimson Petal and the White by Michael Faber
A hugely satisfying, triple-decker reinvention of the Victorian novel that takes you where Dickens feared to tread. Sugar, a literate and resourceful prostitute, struggles to haul herself out of the gutter and up through cruel, class-ridden London. Faber creates an immensely rich world and exits with a flourish that stops you in your tracks.
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The Queen of the South by Arturo Perez-Reverte
"The telephone rang, and she knew she was going to die." This fast-moving tale of a gangster's moll drops you abruptly into the alien world of Mexican and Spanish drug cartels and carries you off. It's a place of jungle runways and fast speed boats, of inverted moral codes and casual death. Taut writing. Excellent dialogue.
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It may seem strange that any one author can combine scientific and literary writing. But the way in which Donna Dickenson thinks about questions in bioethics depends a great deal on her commitment to real lives and real situations, rather than abstract principles.
My favourite books of the decade are:
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Peace like a River by Leif Enger
The most beautifully written book of the decade came out in 2001: Leif Enger's first novel, Peace like a River. Everything about the book is embarrassingly out of fashion: plot (an epic quest in pursuit of an outlaw), landscape (the Dakota badlands) and characters (the miracle-working patriarch Jeremiah Land, the younger sister with the improbably folksy name of Swede). But actually it's a book about the stupid persistence of love and its selfless fatal consequences, even after death. 'Be jubilant, my feet', the next-to-last chapter, takes us to Eden and drops us off just short of Heaven. Not many writers can do that.
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Suite Française by Irène Némirovsky
It's the background of my second book that's compelling, rather than the style. During the Second World War, Irène Némirovsky's Suite Française was carried in minuscule-script rough draft from one hideout to another by her twelve-year-old daughter, as she and her five-year-old sister fled from the French authorities who had already collaborated in shipping the Némirovsky parents to their deaths in the concentration camps. The daughter had no idea what was in the bundle she was carrying, but it survived, as did she and her sister.
In 2004 the book was finally published: two parts of a Balzac-style interwoven saga which was originally meant to encompass five separate novels. I was working in Paris at the time and read it there, where it compelled the French to re-open the question of their involvement in the fate of the Jews. Think about it next time you travel through the Drancy junction north of Paris on Eurostar: that's where the death trains left from.
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Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel
Finally, I'm sure I won't be the only person to choose Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall, winner of this year's Booker Prize. I've admired Mantel for nearly twenty years: her range, her black humour, her tremendous intelligence, and her utter confidence with diction in a manner that few historical novelists can match.
What I particularly like in this book is its iconoclasm: she sees through the usual stereotypes of this period, making Henry the Eighth not so much evil as weak (although there's no necessary contradiction there), and Thomas More less of a martyr than a bully. But even More, the unexpected villain of the piece, is trapped: the book is permeated with an atmosphere of claustrophobia. And yet it's also humorous, racy and superbly crafted.
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Patricia Fara lectures in the History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Cambridge and is the Senior Tutor of Clare College. Her writing has appeared in New Scientist, Nature, The Times, and New Statesman. She also writes a regular column for Endeavour.
My favourite books of the decade are:
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Leadville by Edward Platt
Victorian anthropologists marvelled at Polynesia, but for me, London's Western Avenue is equally fascinating, familiar yet also remote. In his empathetic, quirky documentary about the realities of life alongside a clogged-up London artery, Edward Platt exposes some of the personal stories concealed beneath bare statistics of urban expansion.
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Einstein's Clocks, Poincaré's Maps by Peter Galison
Albert Einstein promoted himself as an absent-minded genius who rode along a rainbow, but Peter Galison brings him down to ground level where his ideas can be understood. Relativity might have launched a philosophical revolution, but its origins lay in the very practical problem of coordinating clocks on opposite sides of the world.
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On Chesil Beach by Ian McEwan
Tastes differ: this book was nominated for a 'Bad Sex Writing' award, but for me it captures perfectly the diffidence and sheer ignorance of a generation caught between old-fashioned moral certainties and the sexual freedom that followed. The Swinging Sixties have an exhilarating reputation, but not everybody enjoyed them.
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