“Just delicious, great celebrations of life. A tonic for a really bad-tempered person like me,” says writer Jenny Diski of Stephen Jay Gould’s essays. Diski based one of her novels – Monkey’s Uncle – on an essay of Gould’s, she says. She has just bought I Have Landed (Vintage) and notes sadly that this is Gould’s final collection. In theory the book is for her holiday, but she says she won’t be able to resist reading it that long.
She’s just finished Wittgenstein’s Poker: The story of a ten minute argument between two great philosophers by David Edmonds and John Eidinow (Faber, 2002). It’s “a clever hook and…
