WHEN Sherlock Holmes and Dr Watson first meet, Watson is shocked by Holmes’s ignorance of the solar system. Holmes explains that there is only so much space in a brain – and such knowledge would take more than he could spare. I see his point. After 680 pages spent chasing the sun, my brain is full to bursting with sun-related knowledge, the gleanings of thousands of bigger and better brains over millennia, relentlessly pursued and lovingly polished into what amounts to one man’s act of sun worship.
Richard Cohen’s exhaustive story of the sun takes us from its beginning to its end, touching on just about everything…
