Physics + Dirac = poetry
Beautiful equations are as concise as haikus and as compelling as verse, writes Graham Farmelo
Students’ Mental Health Needs: Problems and Responses, edited by Nicky Stanley and Jill Manthorpe
Student life is a time of change and adjustment, and students' families as well as staff need resources to help them provide support for students experiencing mental health difficulties. Based on recent research findings and drawing on the experiences of professionals, academics and service users, this book explores how the needs of students can best be met bystudent and community mental health services. All of the contributors to this chapter have lost a son or daughter to suicide. Each of the stories is unique, as are the attempts to understand what led up to the child's death.
The puritan paradox
Oliver Cromwell is popularly thought to have been hostile to the arts but his regime left a surprising cultural legacy, writes Muriel Zagha
Only the lonely
Why would anyone want to live in a hollow trunk? Blake Morrison finds out how hermits come and go in Isabel Colegate's A Pelican in the Wilderness: Hermits, Solitaries and Recluses
An ice little earner
Geoffrey Moorhouse on the man who cooled the world in Gavin Weightman's slice of the American dream, The Frozen Water Trade: How Ice from New England Lakes Kept the World Cool
A bellyful of auks
Gretel Ehrlich's obsession with romanticising hardships in This Cold Heaven: Seven Seasons in Greenland leaves Jenny Diski feeling queasy
Born to be wild
Ian Sansom on Savage Girls and Wild Boys: A History of Feral Children, Michael Newton's playful yet scholarly exposition of what wild children mean for the concept of human nature
Lost for words
How is it that a man with brain disease can no longer read, yet can still do mathematical calculations? In a new Guardian book of science essays, Brian Butterworth explores the mysteries of memory
Net losses
Robert Peston on Dot.Con: The Greatest Story Ever Sold by John Cassidy, the story of how everyone thought that there would always be a greater fool than them
Marriage of opposites
Thomas Carlyle was possibly impotent and certainly obsessed with shit - hardly the ideal husband. Kathryn Hughes explores his relationship with his wife, Jane, in Rosemary Ashton's Portrait of a Marriage
A walk in the crocodile’s shoes
Benedict Allen tells John Cunningham about the role of the adventurer
Castles in the sea
Is Graham Hancock bonkers? His theories on the origins of civilisation have been dismissed by archaeologists as rubbish. But as he tells Stephen Moss, a discovery off the coast of India may prove him right.
A new word order for 2002
From the infant mouth of the year 2002, the first new words and phrases have begun to croak out into the ears of dictionary editors.
The little and large show
Caroline Roux on the Bouroullec brothers' weird world of domestic design