The first time I met Lewis Wolpert he tried to kill me – intellectually, that is. He almost succeeded. I was defending my book Understanding the Present and he was accusing me of being a closet Christian, an agent of the Tory government (this was the early 1990s) and an all-round dunce. I survived because I realised that all this said more about Lewis than it did about me or [...]

In my customarily prolonged hypnopompic condition on Saturday morning, I became aware that there was a government "initiative" about passports. It was all about proving we are who we say we are. This is overambitious. Tony Blair wouldn't get a passport, as he plainly isn't who he says he is. And don't get me started on Gordon Brown. Also, after a long, bad Friday, I was feeling sensitive about the [...]

Erythropoietin is a hormone produced by the body in reaction to low blood oxygen levels. It increases the number of red blood cells. An engineered version of the hormone - known as r-EPO - was devised in the 198os. Intended for medical use, it became very popular among sportsmen, especially cyclists, because it had the effect of massively enhancing the oxygen-carrying capacity of their blood. The improvement in the performance [...]

British jurors are offered an alternative when they are sworn in. Either they can swear on the Bible or any other holy book or they can "affirm". The latter option is plainly for atheists or the secular-minded. During a recent spell of jury service at the Old Bailey, I saw one woman affirm. All of the rest - a sample, in my presence, of perhaps 40 people - swore on [...]

There were two space races, both of them won by America. One was the civilian/scientific race that ended when Neil Armstrong stepped on to the moon in 1969. The other was the military race that ended 20 years later with the collapse of communism, following Mikhail Gorbachev's realisation that the Soviet Union had no hope of competing with the US technologically or financially.

Now there is no race and precious [...]

Journeying into the mind of Philip K Dick is a risky undertaking. Even when he wasn't totally, officially crazy, he was pretty loopy. His madness, moreover, had a particularly insinuating quality that would at once call into question your own sanity. Letting him inside your head is tricky enough; getting inside his is courting disaster.

Perhaps it helps to be French. Emmanuel Carrere announces that this is "a very peculiar [...]

There are few things more exhilarating than the authoritative endor-sement of human ignorance. It resolves an imaginative tension from which we all suffer. We feel that the world is indecipherable, unknowable; yet, at the same time, we fear this may reflect nothing more than our own failing. There may be others - shrewder, wiser, better read - to whom it all makes perfect sense.

Economics is particularly threatening in this [...]

Between 1895 and 1898, H G Wells wrote four science fiction masterpieces - The Time Machine, The Island of Dr Moreau, The Invisible Man and The War of the Worlds. Then, as now, SF was seen as not quite respectable by literary types. The vile George Bernard Shaw sneered at Wells, and even his own literary patron, W E Henley, told him: "You could also do better - far better [...]

Books, like newspapers, require headlines. Life, however, has none. Headlines are thus eye-catching lies or, at the very least, distortions. This may be troubling, but it becomes serious only if the copy beneath partakes of the lie. It is therefore the obligation of the writer to subvert the best efforts of the editor. In this, the New Yorker journalist James Surowiecki has succeeded.

The real headline of this book is [...]

Barry Schwartz writes: "Because of a ubiquitous feature of human psychology, very little in life turns out quite as good as we expect it will be."

The default human condition is suffering and loss, and what few rewards are available - Schwartz's example is a Lexus - quickly turn to ashes in the mouth. Having the Lexus is not as good as buying the Lexus and, furthermore, possession quickly exposes [...]