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Which way is the Earth spinning? Was Shakespeare a rebel? Is Wittgenstein always right? Would Mussolini have been interested in archaeology? These are the kind of provocative questions sometimes faced by applicants at Oxbridge interviews. To encourage everyone to try wrapping their brains around them, Cambridge graduate John Farndon has compiled his second selection of such questions, each with an essay illustrating possible ways of answering.

Few subjects have attracted as much received wisdom as gardening. In this collection of articles, Daily Telegraph gardening columnist Ken Thompson sorts the genuine from the hokum, the essential tasks from those that aren’t worth doing. This entertaining and informative miscellany contains advice on how to attract more wildlife to the garden, the ideal temperature for a compost heap, and how bees can improve a strawberry crop.

With a talent for distilling complex facts into simple and easy-to-digest articles, astrophysicist Jillian Scudder authors the successful blog Astroquizzical, in which she answers readers’ questions about all things cosmological. This book collects the finest and most informative blog posts and offers a complete picture of the Earth, its cosmological family and its place in the universe.

When grumpy millennial Ben found that he could enjoy a catered four-day holiday for £100 in the company of his elders, he went ahead and booked six. During the resultant adventures he made friends across the generation gap, and these memoirs are full of tales of the wisdom, eccentricity and abandon of his elders. Off-mint.

During her first 12 months in Denmark, journalist Helen Russell recorded the ups and downs of suddenly moving abroad as well as her insights into the country’s reputation for being the happiest place on earth. While acknowledging its social problems, and including a postscript to this edition exploring terrorism, immigration and coronavirus, she concludes that there is much to recommend their way of life.

Mark Forsyth, presents ‘a day’s jaunt through the lost words of the English Language’: from Uhtceare, the Old English word for ‘lying awake before dawn and worrying’, and break of day; through washing and dressing in front of a tooting-glass (the mirror); working or quomodocunquizing (making money in any way that you can); then on to supper (or is it dinner?) and so to bed, or dreamery.

Beginning with the gladiators’ ritual ‘Hail, Caesar! They who are about to die salute you’ on 1 January, WB Marsh’s year of great quotations and the stories behind them ranges across history from antiquity to 2016. The words of participants, whether kings, revolutionaries or poets, offer intriguing and often surprising perspectives on historic events: the ‘empire on which the sun never sets’ turns out to be, not the British, but the Holy Roman Empire, ruled by Charles V from 28 June 1519.

In 1967 Major Paddy Bates proclaimed himself ruler of an abandoned Second World War fort in the North Sea. Incorporating many rare photographs and interviews with surviving members of Sealand’s royal family, this book tells the story of how this island nation fought off the British government and armed mercenaries for half a century, preserving its independence to this day.

During his spells at Stamford Bridge and Anfield, Mo Salah has established himself as one of the great Premier League players, worthy of having a pair of his boots displayed at the British Museum. This appraisal follows his career from his Egyptian childhood to Liverpool’s 2020 Premier League title, delayed due to the pandemic.

Before the harmful effects of radioactive substances were fully understood, radium was considered to be a wonder material and was incorporated into a range of commercial products. This study examines how the newly discovered element was used in the first half of the 20th century in luminescent paints, cosmetics, health treatments and even food and drink.

Dudley Buck was one of America’s leading computer scientists, the inventor of the superconducting chip Cryotron that promised ever-smaller computers, and coding systems vital to the space race. In May 1959, after top Soviet scientists visited his lab, he died suddenly. Co-written by his son, this book uses recently declassified documents and Buck’s own archive to explain the implications of his discoveries and question his cause of death. Slightly off-mint.

Bestselling writer Brian Clegg examines the multiplicity of claims in the media and on the internet about which foods and practices are genuinely good or bad for your health. He takes a sceptical look at popular beliefs such as those about E-numbers, caffeine, antioxidants and phone masts, exposing myths to provide reliable information. Slightly off-mint.

On 25 August 1939, nine days before France declared war on Germany, the staff of the Louvre began history’s greatest museum evacuation. The artworks went first to the châteaux of the Loire valley, then moved on to escape the advancing Nazis – Mona Lisa made six nail-biting journeys to new hide-outs. Here, Gerri Chanel tells the story of the curators’ battles to save the Louvre collections, from the first exodus to the homecoming in the summer of 1945.

Since 1927, the biennial Ryder Cup has been the setting for some of golf’s most dramatic scenes. As this history relates, the post-war American domination was famously broken at Lindrick in 1957, and by the Jacklin-inspired draw in 1969, whereas, since Jack Nicklaus suggested European involvement, the contest has been more even, leading to outcomes like the ‘Miracle at Medinah’.

This explanation of quantum physics outlines the science and demonstrates how the properties of atoms, photons and electrons are being used to transform the world. It describes how they are already being harnessed in MRI scanners, smartphones and other gadgets, and also explores the possibilities for future technologies, such as creating faster, more secure computers.

The eponymous theorem was just one of many mathematical interests of the 6th-century BCE thinker Pythagoras of Samos, who believed that numbers were the key to understanding the cosmos. Piecing together the scant evidence left by his obsessively secretive followers, Ferguson reconstructs Pythagoras’ life and doctrines, then traces his profound influence on Western thought, from Plato to Russell.

A wayward but exceptional footballer, Paul Pogba has been a Champions League finalist and World Cup winner. This book explores the mindset and development of the Manchester United, Juventus and France star, whose childhood nickname was ‘The Pickaxe’.

Nikola Tesla (1856–1943) was both acclaimed as a scientist and denounced as a charlatan. This biography follows the Serbian-born inventor’s emigration to the USA, his work with Edison, and their subsequent rivalry. It assesses his achievements, including the development of the AC electrical system, and his visionary ideas such as wireless electricity that continue to inspire today’s Silicon Valley entrepreneurs.

This biography of the footballing great focuses on the personal choices and attributes that Messi and his family developed from an early age, and how his humility and work ethic fed into his greatest moments in the game.

Kylian Mbappé became the world’s most expensive teenage footballer when he signed for PSG in 2018, and has also starred in the French national team. This account by two journalists discusses his early life and career in detail.

Examining the stories behind the crime page headlines of the 20th century, James Polchin shows how gay people were criminalized and discriminated against in American law, and in their treatment as the victims of offences. He also explores the momentum gathered by the gay rights movement in 1969 following protests against the brutality of the police raid at Stonewall Inn.

Greenland’s icy expanses have long drawn explorers and scientists. The first part of this book follows the footsteps of Nansen and other early visitors; the second records the exploitation of the country’s resources since 1949, assessing the effect of global warming on its ice sheets and what that means for the planet as a whole.

Peter Laws, a Baptist minister, has a personal fascination with horror culture. In this personal odyssey he attempts to understand why people like to be scared or disgusted, journeying to Transylvania and hunting werewolves in Hull. He also discusses whether embracing the gothic and gruesome is actually the healthiest way for us to confront our fear of death. Slightly off-mint.

How did France’s youngest-ever president assemble the network, team and finances to sweep to electoral victory in just twelve months? Based on previously unpublished interviews with Emmanuel Macron’s friends, mentors, opponents, and key members of his team, this first biography in English charts his meteoric rise. It outlines his political vision, examines his support-base, analyses his strengths and weaknesses, and asks what his presidency means for Britain and the EU.

In 1817 James Parkinson defined the disease that bears his name so precisely that it is still diagnosed today by recognizing the symptoms he identified. In this study, the story of Parkinson’s significant contributions to the Age of Enlightenment is told through his three passions – medicine, radical politics and fossils. The book restores a neglected pioneer to his rightful place in history and creates a vivid portrait of life as an ‘apothecary surgeon’ in Georgian London.

From theories of red vegetation and canal systems to Elon Musk’s ambitions in the race to Mars, Andrew May looks at our fascination with the red planet and the practicalities of getting there, covering topics including the development of rocket science and 50 years of robots and rovers on Mars.

This companion to the award-winning His Dark Materials trilogy includes a biography of Philip Pullman, analysis of his stories and an exploration of the philosophical ideas and literary influences that lie behind them. Written with the help of Pullman himself, the book also features an interview in which he discusses the process of writing.

Dudley Buck was one of America’s leading computer scientists, the inventor of the superconducting chip Cryotron that promised ever-smaller computers, and coding systems vital to the space race. In May 1959, after top Soviet scientists visited his lab, he died suddenly. Co-written by his son, this book uses recently declassified documents and Buck’s own archive to explain the implications of his discoveries and question his cause of death.

As a Hollywood agent who was being trailed by the FBI in the McCarthy era, Clancy Sigal was witness to Tinseltown in its Blacklist heyday. This memoir recalls parties with stars such as Humphrey Bogart and Barbara Stanwyck, drinking sessions with Peter Lorre, and tells outrageous stories of excess, greed and ambition. Slightly off-mint.

Mario Balotelli won league titles in Italy and England, having played for elite clubs including Inter Milan and Liverpool, but is best remembered for his off-field antics, training ground bust-ups, and run-ins with the police and the fire brigade. Caioli, a respected sports journalist, discusses both his career and personal life, drawing on interviews with friends, family and teammates.

With a talent for distilling complex facts into simple and easy-to-digest articles, astrophysicist Jillian Scudder authors the successful blog Astroquizzical, in which she answers readers’ questions about all things cosmological. This book collects the finest and most informative blog posts and offers a complete picture of the Earth, its cosmological family and its place in the universe.

An astrophysicist, science journalist and former BBC Science editor, David Whitehouse tells the dramatic ‘inside story’ of the race to the Moon, drawing on his own archive of notes, tapes and extensive interviews with astronauts, as well as his familiarity with the science and, not least, a vivid memory of watching television, transfixed, as Neil Armstrong stepped onto the Moon on 20 July 1969.

Arranged alphabetically from Bath Abbey to York Minster, Sue Dobson’s selection includes Anglican, Catholic and Presbyterian cathedrals, abbeys now in ruins and abbey churches, and notable parish churches such as Great St Mary’s (the ‘University Church’) in Cambridge and the Norman church of St Kyneburgha in Castor. Dobson describes every building, noting particular features worth seeking out, sketching its history and revealing little-known facts and anecdotes.

Almost half of the historic palaces selected in this guide are in the British Isles and the book provides succinct overviews of each building's history and notable features as well as visitor information. Entries include the Tower of London, Balmoral and Conwy Castle and international examples range from Versailles to the Forbidden City in Beijing.

As the daughter of a butler and a lady's maid, Enid Elliott Linder spent her early years in some of England's grandest country houses. Her visceral memoir describes how her life changed after the family moved to a Marylebone tenement and an uneasy Britain headed towards war.

Replacing a single bit of a traditional computer, which has a binary capacity of one or zero, with the almost infinitely more versatile qubit of quantum computing opens up tremendous potential processing power but there are significant problems in the practical realization of such machines. This introduction explains how the strange properties of the quantum world can be harnessed and examines the latest prototypes at the cutting edge of this technology. Slightly off-mint.

Brian Clegg begins his investigation into what makes each of us unique with a genealogical approach, hunting down common ancestors before going back to basic atoms. From these ‘building blocks of everything’, he traces the emergence of life, consciousness and personality, environment and culture in a quest to lead readers to a better understanding of how remarkable they are.

‘There’s always an extra connection, another link that joins two words that most of mankind quite blithely believe to be separate’. Erudite, discursive and highly entertaining, Forsyth’s book pursues the etymological pathways from ancient languages and through the twists and (often ribald) turns of English, demonstrating how testicles are linked to testaments and parentheses to codpieces; how the Vikings’ Sedge-Stream relates to Starbuck’s; and how the Zodiac’s Gemini becomes both equal sign and oily beaver.

Although predicted by Einstein’s general relativity, it was not until 2015 that gravitational waves – ripples in space and time – were first detected. This accessible introduction to their discovery explains how the technology required to record movements 100 times smaller than the nucleus of an atom was developed, and how, with their ability to travel through barriers that stop light, the waves offer a new way to investigate the universe.

After the Second World War, the ‘iron curtain’ divided Germany, leaving the British, American and French sectors of the devastated capital stranded in the Soviet-controlled East. Only three air corridors remained open, and between June 1948 and September 1949, Allied air forces defied the blockade, delivering food and fuel by plane. Barry Turner gives a full account of the crisis developing between East and West, the events leading up to June 1948, and the heroic Airlift that saved a besieged city.

Using examples from a vast range of writings, Mark Forsyth presents an amusing and wonderfully erudite guide to the ‘formulas, flowers and figures’ of rhetoric. For each of 39 figures, he explains some that are well-known - hyperbole, paradox, rhetorical questions – and other, less familiar strategies that work their magic behind the scenes, such as diacope in the immortal phrase ‘Bond. James Bond.’

Herne Hill Velodrome has been at the centre of British cycling since it was built in the 1890s. Although in decline from the 1960s it was at the heart of the new boom in the sport from the 1990s. This history of the venue recalls its many important competitions and the great riders who were regulars at the track, from Tommy Simpson to Bradley Wiggins.

This third part of Rolls-Royce’s company history picks up the story in 1987 when privatization began a new era for the firm. Both the aeronautical and car businesses struggled in the 1990s, after the recession, and the rights to make Rolls-Royce cars were subsequently sold, but the introduction of the Trent family of turbofan engines restored the company’s fortunes in the aero engine market. Off-mint.

Mark Felton tells the true story of how a group of British and Commonwealth senior officers escaped from Mussolini’s POW camp – an elaborate medieval castle in the Tuscan hills – and set off on the 200-mile journey to Switzerland and freedom.

The midget submarines that were famously used to attack the battleship Tirpitz in 1943 were developed further and the improved 'XE-class' craft were used in a daring attack on Singapore harbour in 1945. This history recounts how 18 British, Australian and New Zealand submariners, two of whom were awarded the Victoria Cross and several others decorated, piloted two XE craft through the Japanese defences to successfully incapacitate the heavy cruiser Takao.

While he commanded the German submarine fleet, Grand Admiral Karl Doenitz earned Allied respect as a military leader and formidable enemy, but after he succeeded Hitler as head of the Third Reich, his name became more closely associated with Nazi ideology. Turner's study looks in depth at the Admiral's character and conduct, particularly his Operation Hannibal, which rescued two million civilians and troops from the Russian advance; his negotiations for ending the war; and his actions in its aftermath.

As he challenges the persistent myth that the Middle Ages brought little scientific progress, Hannam shows that the Church did not hold back ‘natural philosophy’, and that even astrology and alchemy were important in the development of modern science. He discusses the period’s sophisticated technological achievements, which include lenses, mechanical clocks and the blast furnace, and highlights the debts owed by Copernicus and Galileo to their medieval forebears’ pioneering ideas. Off-mint.

This personal selection of great ecclesiastical architecture features buildings in 27 countries. Chosen both for decorative interest and for the stories behind them, the structures range from Ethiopian rock-hewn churches to Rio de Janeiro’s colossal concrete cathedral.

By building and populating a virtual universe, Clegg demonstrates that reality is not a system of immovable absolutes; instead, the ever-shifting world of relativity is what provides the frame of reference that allows us to understand both the universe and humanity’s place within it.

John Henry discusses how the 16th-century astronomer Copernicus not only disproved the ‘common-sense’ view that the Earth was stationary but also showed what mathematics can reveal about the material world, setting in motion the development of a completely new physics.

This survey of the ancient Greek scientific tradition introduces pioneering figures, including Archimedes, Aristotle and the Hippocratic doctors, and explains the theories with which they developed a rational attitude to the natural world.

The fast-moving 20th century brought extraordinary medical and technological advances as well as some of humanity’s darkest hours. These 50 snapshots encapsulate the century through defining moments from the Boxer Rebellion to the exponential growth of the World Wide Web.

This introduction to political theory surveys the various forms of rule by the few and by the many, including key elements of democracy and different schools of communism, together with concepts in the fields of political economy and international relations.

From life’s origins to humanity’s future, this overview of evolution covers such topics as the geological record of early organisms, the processes by which natural selection created millions of species, and the development of our modern understanding of genetics.

For anyone wanting the quick answer to ‘what is free market capitalism?’ or a brief profile of David Ricardo, this illustrated crash course brings together the 50 most thought-provoking economic theories and theorists and explains each of them in half a minute.

Questions about Dracula’s blood temperature, risk-taking behaviour, sexuality, social status and wealth are among the many issues raised in this sharp-witted dissection of Bram Stoker’s novel Dracula.

James Clerk Maxwell’s famously challenging thought experiment in which a Demon controls a door between hot and cold gases, suggests that the second law of thermodynamics can be broken. In this very accessible biography, the Demon as a narrator helps Brian Clegg argue that Maxwell’s work in fields such as electricity and magnetism not only laid the groundwork for much modern physics, but put him on a par with Newton and Einstein.

In 1968 the singer Serge Gainsbourg, devastated by his break-up with Brigitte Bardot, met Londoner Jane Birkin, who would revive his career and his personal life. Following the author’s itinerary as she zigzags across France from Deauville to St Tropez to interview their friends and associates – and in Paris, Jane herself – this book explores the charismatic couple’s 10-year romantic and creative partnership.