The Surprising Rebirth of Belief in God (Tyndale Elevate) by Justin Brierley Justin Brierley’s new book is a strange thing indeed. The ex-host of the hugely popular Christian radio show Unbelievable? is on a mission to convince us that belief in God (within any religion, though he admits his interest is Christianity) is on the rise. The problem is,...

If science has a native tongue, it is mathematics. Equations capture, precisely, the relationships among the elements of a system; they allow us to pose questions and calculate answers. Numerically, these answers are precise and unambiguous – but what happens when we want to know what our calculations mean? Well, that is when we revert to our own native...

My Blue Peninsula (Linen Press) by Maureen Freely As Israel escalated its assault on Gaza in October, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan posted on social media describing the Jewish state’s campaign in the strip as “bordering on genocide”. The same week, Turkey contributed troops, aviation equipment and artillery to a joint military exercise with...

Gen Z are given a great deal of credit these days. Born between 1997 and 2012, they’re the generation with their heads screwed on, trusted to sort out the mess the rest of us have made of the world. This generation, now aged 12 to 27, were the first full “digital natives”, having never known life without the internet. If you have a Gen Z person in...

"I’ve done quite a lot of work in various media, from making videos, to writing live science shows, to writing books,” Alom Shaha tells me, over the phone from his home in Kent. “And I would put it all down to the fact that I kind of fucked up my physics degree.” There are direct routes from studying physics to a career in teaching physics. Shaha took...

The rise of China is one of the most remarkable stories of our times, and perhaps one which will define the 21st century. The country, with the second-largest population in the world, often features in the western imagination as a financial and political antagonist, a communist-capitalist ideological chimera – and, to some, a possible roadmap to the...