Their new book shows that, as well as a 24-hour clock, organisms contain a circannual clock with a periodicity of a year. These two studies provide a remarkable glimpse into the working of nature's inbuilt timing mechanisms. You can read my review of Seasons of Life here.

Sections of our city centres are being sold off to private developers to create shopping monocultures such as Westfield London or "malls without walls" like Stratford City, which is being built for the 2012 Olympics and is one of the largest retail-led developments in Europe. It is, says Minton, "a private city within a city" and represents a return to the early 19th century when aristocrats owned great swathes of London, fortifying their estates of up-market housing with gates and private security forces.

Now, “land and property which has been in public hands for 150 years or more is moving back into private hands”. Minton argues that today’s privatised city centres and gated communities are fostering "a new culture of authoritarianism and control". Private security guards watch and record our every move with CCTV: the UK now has more surveillance cameras than the rest of Europe combined. The small city of Coventry will soon have 700. At Stratford City they intend to use unmanned aerial drones to watch the streets. In these privatized zones, security guards routinely move on beggars and the homeless, and they can even ban groups of young people and prevent the taking of photographs.

Our modern houses and streets may be "secured by design" (to quote the jargon), but Minton’s compelling argument is that "we are making the city a far more fearful place". The obsession with security and the privatisation of public space is also “a challenge to a type of public life, public culture and democracy in British cities” that has existed since at least the nineteenth century. Instead of local councils "owning" the city for us, now our streets and buildings (for example, Manchester’s Free Trade Hall) are being bought by investors. According to Minton, “today the ‘public good’ is what makes the most money”. It is government policy to sell off local authority assets worth £30 billion by 2010. The manager of one “Business Improvement District” controlling a city centre tells her: “Bugger democracy. Customer focus is not democratic.”

Clearly, it is important that cities should have vibrant economies. But in Britain the pursuit of profit threatens to undermine the quality of urban life. Minton’s book is a powerful indictment of urban planning in the UK under both Conservative and New Labour governments. It is essential reading for anyone concerned about how our cities will feel and function in the future.

“Perhaps it is because I was nearly born underwater.” The first sentence of Philip Hoare’s memorable study of whales points teasingly to an early affinity between author and subject. His mother began to feel labour pains while on a tour of a submarine in Portsmouth harbour. As a boy he lay awake at night listening to the “clanking dredgers” gouging a channel through Southampton Water for the liners and container ships.

But although the sea was a formative influence it was also a source of anxiety: “I have always been afraid of deep water.” School trips to Southampton’s municipal swimming pool did nothing to cure his fear. He only learnt to swim as an adult. But now he admits to feeling claustrophobic if he is far from the sea and, like Ishmael in Herman Melville’s epic novel Moby-Dick (1851), Hoare is “haunted” by the whale.

Read my review here and listen to Claire Armitstead's interview with the author at the Guardian.

"The thing before you is no longer an animal, a fellow-creature, but a problem," says HG Wells's mad vivisector Dr Moreau, attempting to justify his grotesque animal experiments. In Pavlov's Dogs and Schrödinger's Cat, the philosopher and psychologist Rom Harré explores the history of scientists who have used plants and animals - the "living laboratory" - to test hypotheses and collect data. But Harré's original and thoughtful study is not explicitly about the ethics of animal experimentation. Instead, he wants to show how the instrumentarium of science is not restricted to beakers and Bunsen burners, but has always included organic apparatus, from Galvani's frog's legs twitching with electricity, to Mendel's pea plants, to thought experiments such as Schrödinger's cat, poised eternally (and inhumanely) between life and death. Indeed, the living laboratory is at the very heart of science, he argues: "animals and plants become devices we research with rather than something we research on".

Read the rest here.

In the same issue are two of my regular short paperback reviews, this time on an urban theme. The first is on that uniquely English phenomenon: the seaside town - Designing the Seaside: Architecture, Society and Nature, by Fred Gray. The second is anthropologist Marc Augé's haunting analysis of modern urban spaces, Non-Places: An Introduction to Supermodernity, reissued with a new introduction by Verso.

A Nuclear Family Vacation: Travels in the World of Atomic Weaponry (Bloomsbury) is by Nathan Hodge and Sharon Weinberger, a husband-and-wife team of US defence reporters turned nuclear tourists. Rather than relaxing on the Florida beach for their holidays they travelled the world in search of nuclear sites. It's an entertaining and informative read with an important conclusion. The whole "nuclear weapons complex", costing billions of dollars a year, is an enterprise that has "lost its way". According to Hodge and Weinberger, it may be time for the US to think the unthinkable and "explore practical options for eliminating the nuclear arsenal". Read more in my review for the Guardian.

Also in the Guardian are a couple of paperback reviews.  Follow the Water: Exploring the Sea to Discover Climate (Basic Books) is an excellent introduction to oceanography by novelist and keen sailor Dallas Murphy. At nearly 900 pages, Cosmos: An Illustrated History of Astronomy and Cosmology by John North (Chicago) is a suitably monumental book about the biggest subject of all. First published in 1993 and now updated and reissued with many beautiful illustrations, this is a definitive history of our love affair with the stars.

Last but by no means least - because believe it or not this book is actually bigger than Cosmos - is the Chambers Dictionary of Science and Technology (Chambers). At over 1370 pages and a full 7 cm thick, this weighty tome is a must-have addition to the library of any science buff, fact checker, word lover, or wannabe contestant of University Challenge. Read my full review, intriguingly titled "Shish-kebab with a spud", in this week's Times Literary Supplement (August 15, 2008).

In his own day, Haeckel was a hugely controversial figure and a hate-figure for many Christians because of his relentless harrying of their beliefs. Historians have savaged Haeckel's reputation and Richards accepts that he was “a man of contradictions”, a driven character and a divisive figure.

But Richards succeeds brilliantly in re-establishing Haeckel as a significant scientist and a major player in the history of evolutionary thought. Richards is particularly good at tracing the origins of Haeckel’s “Romantic evolutionism”. As the author of an earlier and equally impressive study of how Romanticism shaped biological thought in the first half of nineteenth century, The Romantic Conception of Life (2002), Richards is ideally qualified for this task.

Before World War I, more people learned about evolutionary theory from Haeckel than any other source, including Darwin’s own writings. In The Descent of Man, Darwin himself praised one of Haeckel’s books, saying “if this work had appeared before my essay had been written, I should probably never have completed it.” Richards portrays Haeckel as an unjustly forgotten genius, a figure of “startling creativity, tireless industry, and deep artistic talent”. Richards argues that Haeckel was Darwin’s “authentic intellectual heir”.

You can read my review in this week's TLS (25 July), or read a longer version here.

I've just reviewed Timothy Boon's excellent Films of Fact: A History of Science in Documentary Films and Television for the Times Literary Supplement. You can read my version here.

The book accompanies an exhibition at the Science Museum. More about that here.

Both are well worth reading. Williams' book sent me back to Wells' novel When the Sleeper Wakes (1899). I'd forgotten what an extraordinary book it is.

The review is not yet online, but you can read my version of it here.

I've just reviewed The Father of Forensics, Evans' new biography of Spilsbury. It's a compelling but gruesome read. My review is in today's Guardian. Be warned: it's not for the squeamish...

Read it here.