We seem to be overwhelmed with Christmas murder mysteries this year - in this case in a puzzler-friendly format as Alexandra Benedict throws in a number of optional challenges for the reader, from spotting references to Fleetwood Mac songs (always a Christmassy activity) to Dickens novel anagrams in the text and a Christmas song puzzle in the chapter headings. If, like me, you just want to get on with the story, then there's a tangled web of relationships and past dark secrets to sort out in tracking down a series of murders that are accompanied by jigsaw puzzle pieces as clues. The murderer has devised these hints for the crossword-setting main character, Edie. The murder mystery itself is satisfying, and Benedict manages the build of clues and red herrings well. But I did have two problems. The lesser one is that Benedict's writing style can be a little uneven. There are some over-baked similes (think 'tree branches reached for them like the bony hands of hair-ruffling au...

Until recently, I'd classified Richard Osman's cosy murder mysteries as 'not worth reading as it's only successful because he's on the TV'. But a friend's write up persuaded me to give them a try - and I confess they are better than expected, if not what I expected.  I'm reviewing the first two books in the series together here because the first, The Thursday Murder Club , feels as if Osman hasn't quite decided what he's writing, while it becomes much clearer in the second book. After reading that, my impression of the first improved significantly. The basics sound more than a little silly. A group of four OAPs in a retirement village attempt to crack old, unsolved murders as entertainment, but this activity draws them into sorting out a current case with the help of a pair of friendly police officers. (It also helps that one of the OAPs is ex-MI6.) What we get in that first title is a perfectly reasonably cosy murder mystery (a genre I generall...

The other day, I was reading the late Christopher Booker's ridiculously long The Seven Basic Plots and came on a spot of science writing that made me gasp in its comprehensive inaccuracy. He is looking at creation myths, giving us three versions, the final being the Big Bang theory, which he tells us 'is still "telling a story", and in this sense we can look at it just as we would look at any other type of story. Now, I have no problem at all with that statement. A scientific theory of any kind is definitely a form of narrative - and since cosmology tends to be at the more speculative end of science, because you can hardly replicate the experiment, it is particularly apt to think of it in this way. But here's the story that Booker tells us: 'The "Big Bang" theory of the creation of the universe suggests that in the beginning there was an agglomeration of hydrogen atoms, so tightly compressed together that it was only millimetres across and of almost...

This time of year I mostly abandon popular science books for lighter reading. As a result, crime will feature frequently in my reviews, which will also often be Christmas- themed. Normal service will be resumed as soon as I've got through my Christmas reading pile.  Image by Mike Blank from  Unsplash   See all of Brian's online articles or subscribe to a weekly digest for free here

This novella gives us a highly engaging Christmas-set (technically it's in Advent) mystery. We start in the New York apartment of the female narrator, who, at Christmas time, unearths an old diary from exactly 30 years before, covering the days leading up to a horrible event in a Cotswold manor house.  The majority of the book consists of these diary entries from student days, which are mostly appropriately fluffy and young adult in feel. But at the heart of it all is something much darker. It's hard to say more without giving anything away, but it's all very neatly done, with two big twists in quick succession about three quarters of the way through.  The only  criticism I have is that once you've hit those twists, the ending is a little bit of a let down, as it feels like there should be a final twist to really finish things off - but it remains a really good, intriguing seasonal read, if you like Christmas with a murderous side. I don't honestly know why Christma...

Janice Hallett has rapidly become the best active light crime writer, bettering her first two books with the outstanding The Mysterious Case of the Alperton Angels , so I rushed to purchase her latest, a Christmas sequel to her remarkable debut The Appeal . Written in her distinctive modern epistolary style - in this case primarily featuring emails and WhatsApp messages, it is an entertaining piece of fluff, but not up to the usual standard. Let's get the good part in first. The storyline features a pantomime, and there is a particularly strong thread of humour here - more so than usual in her books. Christmas always makes a great setting for a cosy mystery, and this comes across nicely here. There was one point (featuring a dog and a bone) when I laughed out loud and plenty more to smile at. As always, Hallett manages brilliantly at using the apparently distancing style of collecting written communications to really get us into the heads of the characters and to keep track of a ta...

This week I'm reviewing two books on the Popular Science website , neither of which was published this year. Usually, book reviews are of the latest titles. This is partly because these are the titles publishers are enthusiastic to get seen, but also tend to be selected to ensure that the reviewer seems current. I think, though, that there are several reasons to consider a book that's been around a while. Sometimes it's because there's a new edition. This may not make much difference to the content, but the book might have been out of print or otherwise hard to come by. Occasionally there may also be genuinely interesting new content (as opposed to yet another preface no one wants to read). I've got a lot in the past out of some annotated books, though my experience with Frankenstein 'annotated for scientists, Engineers and Creators of all kinds' was not great. One of my reviews this week will be a new edition. The visibility created by a new edition (even ...

I was going to call this post ‘lovin’ a good boffin’, but it felt too much like a double entendre.  The term 'boffin' is an outdated British term for a scientist, which now only crops up in tabloid newspapers. It's an affectionate term, but with an element of mad scientist about it. For some time now, the Institute of Physics has been running a campaign to 'bin the boffin'. In a Physics World article , Rachel Youngman puts the case for binning the boffin: 'We believe that boffin is a lousy way to talk about scientists. The term has negative impacts – it is poorly understood, strongly associated with the male gender and is confusing. When we surveyed our members last year, they told us that the term was unhelpful and inaccurate, with younger members stating it actively puts them off science.' You might wonder, if they were put off science what they're doing being members of the Institute of Physics, but that's a different story. I love the Institute o...

The premise of this novel is excellent - it's a cross between House of Cards and The Circle . A tech company is attempting to get its flying cars off the ground (both literally and metaphorically). The company's erratic CEO has brought in a political lobbying company, because it's no easy job to get permission for flying cars in the skies of a city (their initial targets are New York, Los Angeles and Austin). Meanwhile it's also no easy job to get the car to fly safely at all. Bradley Tusk - who has been both a political operator and a venture capitalist, so has an ideal background - brings to the fore the two people at the top of the lobbyists - the ruthless Nick and his number two, Lisa (arguably the main protagonist), Susan the CEO, and her chief engineer, Yevgeny. They join a large cast of characters from FBI agents to corrupt city mayors and union bosses. Tusk also gives a very cynical (but probably accurate) picture of the totally self-serving nature of US politi...

My favourite comic strip of all time is The Perishers . Published in the Daily Mirror from the late 50s until 2006 it could be taken at first glance as something of a Peanuts rip-off. After all, it features only children and animals - and the central characters are a boy and his dog (whose thoughts are revealed to be very human-like). However, in reality the feel and the humour is totally different and entirely British. At its best, The Perishers  is a total delight. One of the strip's features is a series of running jokes, some of which carried on for decades. For example, on summer holiday excursions, the characters regularly take a look in a rock pool, where the crabs believe they are being visited by their equivalent of UFOs which they refer to as 'the eyes in the sky', often having failed protests or attempts to take on the invaders. Other continuing jokes are just small features that bring on a smile, one being the teddy belonging to Baby Grumpling, a cynical toddler...

I'm delighted to say that I'll be giving my talk based on my new book Interstellar Tours at the Royal Institution in London on 16 March 2024 (see the Ri website for details/booking). Speaking at the Royal Institution is always something of a thrill. When I first gave a talk there, they had a terrifying introduction. It went something like this. 'Welcome to the Royal Institution, where lectures to improve the public understanding of science have been given since 1800. Ten of the chemical elements were either discovered or first isolated here. Michael Faraday lectured many times from this very desk. Now Brian Clegg is going to talk to you...' For the pedants amongst you, it's now reasonably widely known that the desk was reconstructed - nonetheless it was certainly the same space with a very similar desk. It was a distinct challenge to follow that. Now they're a little less scary to their speakers, but even so there's a certain necessity to perform well that...

I was wandering around a bookshop the other day (after the obligatory check to see if they had my latest in stock), and was struck by a significant difference between the general fiction books and the science fiction section*. In the general fiction, there were plenty of classics. Books that we may now feel are a little dated in some ways, but nonetheless are great works of fiction and deserve to be read still. But amongst the science fiction, apart from a few Asimovs and the inevitable Dune (for obvious movie reasons), most of the great names of the past were simply missing. This feels wrong. I don't think my reaction is pure nostalgia. Admittedly, not every past SF title has aged well. But, for instance, the last two SF books I've read were by Pohl & Kornbluth and Bester respectively, and both were still far more engaging than whatever this week's Brandon Sanderson title is. For that matter, many of the classics aren't good pieces of writing when measured by some...

In their 2010 book The Grand Design, Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow told us that there was no longer any need for philosophy because science was ready to answer all the big questions. I thought they were wrong at the time, and reading the book Why? by Philip Goff underlines how valuable good philosophy (I am the first to admit that the field contains plenty of hot air - I'm not talking about all philosophy) can be. I reviewed the book Why? on the Popular Science website, but I wanted to pick out one example of where taking what you might call a mathematically philosophical view neatly disposes of a piece of cosmological sophistry that has always got on my nerves. I have often seen the fine tuning of the universe used an argument for the multiverse existing. Many variables of nature have to have values very close to the ones we observe if life is to exist. It's not generally considered scientific to attribute this fine tuning to some sort of divine or panpsychic cause,...

Every morning I listen to a podcast on my walk, and more often than not it's a UK political podcast. Where once they were sparse, there are now huge numbers of middle of the road podcasts to suit my taste - but I have found that some old favourites have become less appetising, displaced by newcomers. The first to drop off its perch was the BBC's Newscast . I'm generally a supporter of the BBC, if not the licence fee (or some of its recent news reporting), but the whole point of a news podcast is to be able to be more informal and get away from the restraints of conventional media. The presenters of Newscast are certainly informal, but they dance around issues because of the BBC's efforts to keep to its sometimes strange ideas of what being impartial is. Also they rarely dig into anything with the depth that a podcast can offer - they cover too many topics, as they aren't pure politics. The second that I'm losing patience with is The News Agents . I always reall...

It's hard to find anyone who says we should trash the environment. But there is a real problem underlying many environmental issues that both individuals and environmental pressure groups seem to miss: there is often a trade-off involved.  It's not enough to say 'we will do this because it's good for the environment' in a blanket way, because many actions taken for environmental reasons will benefit one aspect of the environment but will be a negative for another. The only honest environmentalism is one where you acknowledge both the positives and negatives - and are prepared to say that one environmental goal is more important than another. For me, there is a very clear priority: climate change. It trumps all other environmental concerns. This doesn't mean we can't be nice to whales or whatever - often actions can be totally positive. But where something is beneficial in terms of reducing climate change, it may need to be adopted even if it raises some nega...

Each Christmas, the TV show University Challenge has a 'celebrity' special. More often than not, the members of the team will never meet again after making the show, but I'm delighted to say that the Lancaster team, of which I was part, have managed to have regular reunion lunches. We've got our latest this week, and are somewhat shocked to discover that it's ten years this November since we took part.  Going down the line, after me comes the youngster of the bunch,  Ranvir Singh  then   Roger Ashton-Griffiths  and last but certainly not least  Matthew Fort . What's delightful about the group is that we are from very different aspects of what you might broadly call the communication business - yet we find we've plenty to chat about with others quite different from those we might encounter in our everyday lives. You can see us introduce ourselves below: See all of Brian's online articles or subscribe to a weekly digest for free here

Although it's rare, it can be interesting when the arts are stimulated by popular science or popular maths. A while ago, a sculptor exhibited a series of pieces based on the cover art of my book A Brief History of Infinity , and I am delighted to recently discover that writer Mary Soon Lee has included a poem in her collection How to Navigate Our Universe inspired by something I wrote in my book Dark Matter and Dark Energy . I don't know for certain, but I'm guessing the text was this: 'Without any idea what could be causing this, astrophysicists, taking the term from American cosmologist Michael Turner, termed the phenomenon dark energy. The name tells us nothing about what is involved. It might just as well have been called factor X or unizap.' Here is the poem (reproduced with permission) - I so wish the astrophysicists had gone with Mister Floofy*: How to Brand Dark Energy --after a remark by Brian Clegg One can hardly be expected to refer to it as that ineffab...

As a science writer, I'm always trying to find ways to make science more approachable. When I recently interviewed teacher and science communicator Alom Shaha, he suggested that being brought up in a family and with teachers who had a positive attitude to science - and who considered it fun, not a chore - had a significant impact. Inevitably this means that the old C. P. Snow 'two cultures' thing rears its head. I brought the two cultures into an article for the Royal Literary Fund on why I thought science fiction is considered not to be in the first rank of writing by many of those in the literary world. And it was writing this that inspired me to attempt to use a touch of science fiction as a bridge to make popular science more approachable in my latest book, Interstellar Tours . This is a book on the science of what's in our galaxy, from black holes and supernovae to planets and nebulae. There have been plenty of such books, but often they feel rather detached from...

In recent edition of the Red Box podcast, the guests were asked which political interviewer they would like to grill them. Some ummed and ahhed for a while: I'm not involved with politics, but wouldn't have to hesitate a moment as it's already happened. I was interviewed a while ago by one of the UK's top political interviewers (now retired), John Humphrys on the Today programme. You can hear the interview here . I was in a different BBC studio from the interviewer when the interview took place, so I couldn't see who was about to interview me, and they didn't tell me in advance which of the Today programme presenters was going to speak to me. I must admit, if I'd known in advance it was going to be Humphrys I would probably have been more nervous than I actually was. But I'm so glad I did have that opportunity.  Nearly ten years ago I was on Christmas University Challenge, so have also been questioned by another of the UK's now retired political in...

The writing community is quite rightly worried about generative AI in two ways. Can a writer be replaced by something like ChatGPT, and could we be accused of using generative AI to do our work for us? One possible solution is to use AI itself to fight back. But before getting into the detail, I ought to explain why this piece isn't titled 'The real McCoy'. That was my first inclination for a title (and I'm sure ChatGPT would have gone with it). It would have given me an opportunity to lever Star Trek into the discussion, and it's a familiar phrase that highlights the issue we're dealing with. According to my trusty Brewer's, the phrase was originally 'the real MacKay' in Britain. A lot of people apparently thought the US version was based on a US boxer called McCoy, but apparently it arose (not entirely surprisingly) in Scotland and was exported to the US as a way of highlighting true Scotch, as opposed to US whiskey. I switched the title to 't...

I see that the Irish musician Hozier has announced that 'he would consider striking over the threat artificial intelligence poses to his industry.' This was taken seriously enough by the BBC News to put it under their high profile Newsnight brand . I'm also not sure how much music artists are truly under threat from AI. Hozier himself suggests he isn't sure if AI-generated music 'meets the definition of art'. More to the point, the music business is about a package, not just a song and AI would have to come on considerably to be able to deliver the whole thing. No doubt a few AI-generated songs could be successful in terms of streaming - but it seems unlikely the music business as a whole would suffer too much. But even if the threat is serious, I can't help but thing Hozier (dangerous autocorrect tendency to make him hosiery) has a weak grasp of economics. While I'm sure that Hozier fans would be disappointed by his disappearance from the scene, the rea...

In the months since ChatGPT and other examples of Generative AI arrived on the scene, plenty of writers and artists have had a genuine concern for their future careers. We now know that these systems have some distinct flaws in writing non-fiction - they struggle to identify the difference between reality and the made up stuff, and have been quite happy to, say, fabricate references because they've spotted references are a good thing , but not that they have to be real. However, this is less of a problem in the field of short fiction, where things are supposed to be made up. When it comes to poetry, although Generative AI can come up with unsubtle stuff (one of the few things it seems quite good at is rap), it struggles for sophistication - but it's very easy to imagine, had there still been a demand for it, that the systems would be good at the kind of pulp fiction that used to be regularly consumed by the masses prior to the 1970s, and that still has a small toehold in, for e...