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John Pritchard, director of strategic planning at Durham University, is reading Tim Dee¡¯s Greenery: Journeys in Springtime (Jonathan Cape, 2020). ¡°In this most vibrant of books, Dee provides a celebration of what D.?H. Lawrence called ¡®the world¡¯s morning¡¯ and what the author refers to as the ¡®greenery which is spring¡¯. A?time of renewal and hope, spring is the season that is anticipated more than any other ¨C?we are always on the lookout for signs. Having noted that spring moves north at about the speed of a swallow¡¯s flight, the author tracks the season and its migratory birds from South Africa to Arctic Scandinavia. In so doing, the reader¡¯s experience of spring is stretched chronologically, geographically and culturally. This is a masterwork in interdisciplinarity, with deep ornithological insight enriched by a keen appreciation of Shakespeare, Coleridge and Wordsworth. Greenery is also a personal book. It is reviving my spirits as we travel through troubled times.¡±

Kalwant Bhopal, professorial research fellow and professor of education and social justice at the University of Birmingham, is reading Sam Harris¡¯ Letter to a Christian Nation: A?Challenge to the Faith of?America (Bantam, 2007). ¡°This short book attacks the existence of religion head-on. The writing style is both challenging and confrontational: ¡®Either Christ was divine or he was not. If the Bible is an ordinary book, and Christ is an ordinary man, the basic doctrine of Christianity is false.¡¯ Harris pulls no punches, and his view that it is a ¡®moral and intellectual emergency¡¯ that nearly half of all Americans believe in Christianity is a key theme throughout. This book will offend, enrage or delight you, but in any case it is a must-read that is bound to change how you think about religion in all sorts of ways.¡±

Carina Buckley, instructional design manager at Solent University, is reading Lisa Randall¡¯s Warped Passages: Unravelling the Universe¡¯s Hidden Dimensions (Penguin, 2006). ¡°Since Einstein and relativity, we¡¯ve become familiar with thinking of time as a fourth dimension and the quantum realm as being very weird. But that¡¯s only a tiny part of the story. Randall, a theoretical physicist dedicated to model building as a way of practical experiment, undercuts that familiarity by introducing several more dimensions, some of inconceivably small size, existing within a five-dimensional ¡®braneworld¡¯. This is, necessarily, a highly complex and many-layered exploration of particle physics, yet also a wholly enthusiastic account of particles, waves, branes and dimensions that comes across as a personal and meaningful journey for the author. Although she could write with a little more clarity, some challenging concepts are on the whole well explained and pretty accessible if you¡¯re willing to concentrate.¡±