Category: Book Reviews

Reviews of books featuring a summary of the book and links to related material

Feb 16 2026

Book review: The Flawed Genius of William Playfair by David R. Bellhouse

My next review is of The Flawed Genius of William Playfair by David R. Bellhouse. I’ve long had a professional interest in data visualisation, William Playfair is a name frequently mentioned in terms of the invention of several types of chart (line, area, bar and pie charts).

Playfair led an interesting life, fleeing from the French Revolution at one point, and spending several spells in debtors prison.

He was born in Scotland in 1759 and died in 1823. His brothers James and John are notable in the own right as an architect and mathematician respectively.

He apprenticed as an engineer in Scotland and went on to work as a draughtsman for James Watt in Birmingham at the Boulton and Watt works between 1777 and 1780.

It is not discussed in this book but Watt and Boulton were probably close to the origin of engineering drawings as we know them now. They needed them to ensure the parts of the engines they sold, made by multiple manufacturers, would fit together. They also had a business model which saw them paid on the basis of how much money they saved their customers. So Playfair would have a combination of the technical skills required to produce data visualisations, and work for a business that had some call for them. It is interesting to note that another person noted for his innovative visualisations was Charles Joseph Minard, a civil engineer.

Playfair would also likely have had knowledge of Priestley’s Chart of Biography (1765) – a sort of timeline diagram, which plotted the lives and deaths of famous people in history, and the New Chart of History (1769) which showed world history in a similar manner. Priestley was a member of the Lunar Society, as was Matthew Boulton.

At the end of his contract with Watt and Boulton Playfair took on their document copier business, arising from an idea by Erasmus Darwin, patented by James Watt. Playfair seems to have set up the manufacturing process for the machines to a high standard but then left to set up his own business.

This business followed on from the type of manufacturing work that Boulton did, making small metal items with machines. It did not go particularly well, he resumed attempts to set up a manufacturing business on moving to Paris in 1787. His view was that the French were trailing the British in their Industrial Revolution so represented a better opportunity than England, where he would always be competing with Boulton. When in France he also made a proposal to replace the “Machine de Marley” which supplied water to Versailles from the Seine – in this he was unsuccessful. He also set up a bank, as well as being involved in the Scioto Company, which looked to sell land in America to French refugees – an issue here was that the company didn’t actually own any land in America!

Playfair left Paris in 1792, as the Reign of Terror started – he had been peripherally involved in the French Revolution at the beginning but later he became strongly opposed. Supporting the British government in their war with Napoleon – he worked as a journalist, proposed a semaphore telegraph scheme and played some part in a scheme to damage the French economically with a scheme for forging French “assignats” – a form of paper currency used in revolutionary France.

It was just prior to moving to Paris that his writing career started, and his first published works in data visualisation: The Commercial and Political Atlas. The data visualisations were the key novelty here, Atlas uses charts to illustrate economic data. Playfair was showing an increasing interest in economics, meeting Adam Smith in 1787, and also writing a pamphlet on interest rates The regulation of the interest of money. He also edited a version of Smith’s Wealth of Nations after his death.

He also wrote extensively on politics, propounding his views on Jacobins, Catholics, the Irish, and the economy. I was a bit lost here since Bellhouse never tells us what a Jacobin is or the broader historical and economic background. Playfair was in favour of a landed gentry continuing to run the country, and against reform of the parliamentary system. Reviews at the time seem to indicate he was a poor writer with not particularly profound opinions. His British Family Antiquity had the side-effect of bankrupting his publisher, although not Playfair himself (this time).

In his desperation for cash he engaged in low level extortion, effectively writing to people he felt might have money and describing how someone was about to write terrible things about them and he was the man to stop them, for small renumeration. One gets the impression from Bellhouse that this was not uncommon at the time.

Ultimately his attempt to set up a bank in England led to his being imprisoned in debtors prison. His Original Security Bank was established in 1797. It provided notes of convenient denomination in exchange for Bank of England notes. It was clearly designed to take advantage of an evolving situation in banking – the Bank of England had recently stopped exchanging paper money for gold as a result of the war with the French. It presented high “regulatory risk”, in fact the founders, Playfair included were briefly imprisoned for forgery.

As it was the Original Security Bank was quickly wound up, as a result of competition and mismanagement and it is from this bankruptcy that Playfair’s multiple trips to debtors prison arose – the first in 1809. He seems to have come off badly relative to his partners in the bank. Being imprisoned for debt meant that his ability to go into business in future was very limited, hence he leant heavily on his writing. The early 19th century was a different time in terms of how bankruptcy was handled – imprisonment in special debtors prison was routine – a practice that ended in 1869 Debtor’s Act. Playfair formed friendships with other debtors whilst in prison, and these were pretty much the only people he could go into business with – several were outright fraudsters and so this did not go well for him.

In the background to all this he was married to Mary Morris possibly in 1780 when their first child, John, was born although wedding banns were read for them in 1795. They had four children, one of whom was blind and thus needed support throughout her life. One wonders how much Playfair was responsible for the financial support of his family.

I have mixed feelings about this book, it is pretty readable but although the author mentions and illustrates Playfair’s work on data visualisation one gets the impression his interest is more in economics, politics and debt. This may simply be an accurate reflection of Playfair’s life but I was more interested in the data visualisation side of his career.

Jan 12 2026

Book review: Neurotribes by Steve Silberman

Following on from my earlier reviews of books on autism this one is of Neurotribes: The Untold History of Autism and the Potential of Neurodiversity by Steve Silberman.

The book is chronological with a couple of lengthy forewords and an introduction by Silberman describing his original contact with the autistic community stemming from the Silicon Valley culture in 2000.

It is easy to see autism as a modern illness, before the eighties clinically defined autism was very rare. However, even under the strict original definitions there were people like 18th century scientist Henry Cavendish who we would identify as autistic. Cavendish did the same walk every day, changing it only once when he met some people on his usual route after which he always used his new route, he ate a leg of mutton every evening. He attended the Royal Society once a week, where his colleagues were touchingly neuroaffirmative – they valued his contributions but knew to talk in his presence to elicit his input rather than talk to him directly – which would cause him to flee. Cavendish flourished because he came from a wealthy family which could support both his scientific tendencies and his personal oddities.

The term “autism”, as we understand it now, was first used almost simultaneously by Leo Kanner in the US in the diagnosis of “early infantile autism,” and Hans Asperger in Austria with the diagnosis “autistic psychopathy” in papers published in 1943 and 1944. The term autism had been coined by Paul Bleuler in 1911 to describe certain symptoms of schizophrenia – a focus on an inner world or the self. Autism was seen as a childhood presentation of schizophrenia.

Asperger worked in the Children’s Clinic in Vienna, he saw his role as finding the special skills of his patients which could be developed so that they could go on to lead fulfilling and hopefully independent lives.

The Children’s Clinic was to become central to the Nazi euthanasia program which saw the murder of nearly 800 children. A survey from a similar institute in Saxony in 1920 had asked effectively “Would it be ok if your child died in our care, you know, a bit “accidentally”.” to which the answer in some cases the answer was “Why are you asking us? Get on with it”. It was here that the Nazi eugenics programs originated. Asperger was at least complicit in this and his work was consequently ignored until the late eighties.

Kanner was Jewish born in the Ukraine 1896 but had left his job as a doctor in Germany in 1923 largely for economic reasons. He had written a book called Child Psychiatry in 1935 and went on to be the head of child psychiatry at the Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore. He later employed two of Asperger’s former colleagues in his clinic at Johns Hopkins, they were Jewish and had fled the Nazis.

Until the 1950s the standard “treatment” for autistic children and indeed anyone with mental illness was institutionalisation in organisations with names like “Home for Non-educable feebleminded children”. As an aside the original name for the UK’s autistic society was the “Society for Psychotic Children”! Over the years various scandals were unearthed regarding these institutions. It wasn’t until the seventies that the US and UK moved to a legal framework in which disabled people had a right to education rather than institutionalisation.

Both Asperger and Kanner had a very narrow view of what constituted autism seeing it has having a very strict set of criteria, restricted to children. Under their criteria incidence was something like 4 in 10000 children. It wasn’t until Lorna Wing’s work in the eighties that Asperger’s work was finally recognised and the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) was updated with new, broader diagnostic criteria. It was from Wing that the term “autistic spectrum” came into being. Even in the early nineties there was debate as to whether autism existed in adults. Nowadays the incidence of a more broadly defined neurodiversity is somewhere in the region of 15-20% of the population.

Diagnosis is about providing support – Wing saw that a lot of children needed support – he daughter included – and were failed by diagnosis. At one point a researcher says that for their research work in autism they applied diagnostic criteria rigorously whilst in private practice they were more permissive so that their patients could get the support they needed. All through the period covered by the book some autistic people have made it through to independent adulthood but it has been dependent on the support they are given. As Kanner said “if one factor is significantly useful, it is a sympathetic and tolerant reception by the school”.

If the environment changes to make life easier then there is less need for diagnosis. We could think of the “diagnosis crisis” as an “environment crisis”, we are building environments – particularly schools which are increasingly challenging for neurodiverse people.

The film “Rain Man”, released in 1989, was an amalgam of several people in real life familiar to the screenwriter Barry Morrow. It produced a sea change in the way autistic people were viewed by wider society.

All through the book parents and their children are central. Many times clinicians observed parents to be rather obsessive about their children’s condition and more often than not at least a bit autistic themselves. Even some of the clinicians involved were neurodivergent. Major figures in the book like Bernie Rimland started their journey as parents of autistic children determined to do their best for them. This is reflected today in the parents of autistic children, who in my experience have very deep knowledge of the bureaucratic systems to navigate in order to get support.

For a long time the focus of parents and the medical establishment has been finding a cure for autism, and there has always been a population of snake oil salesmen willing to sell that cure (or at least find a cause to blame). Autism was variously attributed to mothers, vaccines, vitamin deficiencies and ultimately genes depending on the mores of the time. Treatments were at times absolutely brutal – until quite recently electrocuting autistic children to change their behaviour was legal. This is where the anti-vaccine movement comes in rising to prominence as a result of the large increase in autism diagnosis due to the change in diagnostic criteria.

Nowadays more and more autistic people are saying they are not looking for a cure but rather a society that provides relevant accommodations. The cause of autism is generally seen as genetic, not a result of parents, the environment, vaccines or medicines.

The final chapters talk about autistic people being able to speak for themselves, starting in the late eighties with Temple Grandin. It is from this period that the terms neurodiverse and neurotypical come. The internet is core to this – social media often work well for autistic people since much of the social complexity is removed. One wonders how banishing children from social media will work for this group. The role that social media plays is not a new thing, in the early to mid-20th century ham radio and science fiction provided a community for many who would now be described as somewhat neurodivergent.

I loved this book, it is highly readable and it speaks to my concerns not only for my son but also for me.

Dec 11 2025

Book review: Pathfinders – The Golden Age of Arabic Science by Jim Al-Khalili

I recently read Science and Islam by Ehsan Masood having struggled to decide whether to read it, or Pathfinders: The Golden Age of Arabic Science by Jim Al-Khalili – it turns out I read both. This is a review of Pathfinders. In reading al-Khalili’s book I was looking for a bit more science than Science and Islam offered.

Al-Khalili is an interesting author for this topic, he was born and raised in Baghdad so learnt something of Arabic Science through school – visiting some of the key sites and living in the city where the Golden Age started. He is also conscious of his separate Persian identity – his family are from Iran.

The book covers the history of the Islamic Empire briefly at the beginning before a series of thematic chapters finishing with one on the decline of Arabic Science during the early modern period and the rise of science in Europe during the Renaissance and a final chapter on Islam and Science in the modern era. As well as notes there are a couple of appendices: one a glossary of scientists, a handy addition with the number of scientists introduced in the book, and an interesting 2D timeline which showed both regimes (such as the Abbasids) and location (from Spain to Iran) which I found really helpful. In a break from my tradition, I reproduce it here.

Timeline: The Islamic World from Antiquity to the Beginning of the Modern Period from Pathfinders by Jim Al-Khalili

Much of the book is focussed on Baghdad where the translation project kicked off under the reign of the seventh Abbasid Caliph al-Ma’mun in the 9th century, alongside this a number of high profile Arab scientist worked, adding to that which they translated. There is an emphasis here on the translation from Persian and Indian sources as well as Greek. Al-Khalili sees the translation of Persian sources and those relating astrology as a bigger motivation than I think is commonly accepted.

I arrived at Pathfinders and Islam and Science by consulting my Bluesky followers, they favoured the Ehsan Masood book although Ehsan Masood liked Jim Al-Khalili’s book for his better access to Arabic sources. I can see why my history of science crowd were not so pleased with Pathfinders. In several places Al-Khalili casts aspersions on historians which I imagine is grating coming from a theoretical physicist and populariser of science.

Perhaps the most significant deviation from orthodoxy in his treatment of al-Ma’mun’s House of Wisdom. Al-Khalili tends to the strong view of it as a proto-University or research centre combining both a library and a workplace for scholars. The more mainstream view amongst historians gives it the status of a library, and on the other extreme there are those who doubt its very existence.

It’s difficult to do justice to the range of scientific subjects covered in Pathfinders, chapters include chemistry, astronomy (several times), numbers, algebra, philosophy, and medicine. Topics such as the invention of zero, and measurements of the size of the earth and optics are discussed in considerable technical detail.

The surprising thing for me was how long it took Arabic/Indian numbers to take hold in Europe (the French Audit Office was still using Roman numerals in the 18th century), and people like Simon Stevin, mathematician, were using their own odd formulation of decimal numbers in the 16th century. Some of this was due to a reluctance to use Arabic inventions apparently this also slowed the uptake of coffee in Western Europe.

Geber the Alchemist (Jabir ibn-Hayyan) gets a chapter pretty much of his own, Al-Khalili describes him as the founder of chemistry. His publication record is obscured by the fact that his name seems to have been attached as author to documents for several centuries after his death. What he actually wrote could be rather cryptic and it is from him that the English word “gibberish” comes. Jabir wrote on both chemistry and its mystical twin, alchemy. He appears to have attracted more opprobrium for this than Isaac Newton who also studied alchemy.

As an aside at the end of the chapter on physicists Al-Khalili points out that Al-Haytham, al-Razi and al-Biruni were using the scientific method long before it was supposedly invented in the early 17th century by Francis Bacon and Rene Descartes.

Although Baghdad was central in the early years of the Golden Age – the 9th and 10th centuries – later on Islamic Spain particularly Cordoba were important. Even after the Mongol sacking of Baghdad in 1256 observational astronomy continued by Arab scientists under Mongol rulers. Al-Khalili’s point here is that Arabic science continued beyond the traditional golden era and was only surpassed by Europe in the mid-fifteenth century. He sees the failure of printing in Arabic to take off as one of the reasons for its final decline. He notes that may have been due in part to an early printing of the Qur’an containing errors which would have been considered a serious offence.

Al-Khalili draws a parallel between the Abbasid translation effort, and the Renaissance translation work sponsored by the Medici family in Florence. Also important in bringing Greek and other works via Arabic was Toledo which became a Christian centre for learning after the fall of the Islamic Empire in Spain.

As a Western European brought up in the seventies and eighties, I was taught that the Renaissance as an effort of translating works directly from ancient Greece and the scientific method came out of Western European thought. In truth it was part of a more continuous process with the work of Arabic scholars spanning the gap back to ancient Greece with translations to Latin from Arabic. Al-Khalili uses the example of Copernicus who cites a number of Arabic scholars but his publications, and historical work over the last 100 years or so, show that the influences may well go deeper.

I enjoyed Pathfinders, I liked the focus on the science side of things, having had a more thorough coverage of the political side of things from Masood’s book. I also liked that some of Al-Khalili’s upbringing in Baghdad came through. It has prompted me to look up books on Indian science in the first millennia and pre-Renaissance science in Europe.

Nov 19 2025

Book review: Kindred – Neanderthal Life, Love, Death and Art by Rebecca Wragg Sykes

This review is of Kindred – Neanderthal Life, Love, Death and Art by Rebecca Wragg Sykes, a book of everything we know about Neanderthals. The aim of the author is to be fully up to date and reveal some of the conversations that academics working on Neanderthals are having now. The story is told across 16 thematic chapters.

Neanderthals first appeared approximately 400,000 years ago and became extinct around 40,000 years ago. Know Neanderthal sites were long concentrated in Western Europe, particularly France and Spain but more recently remains have been found much further East, well into Asia. They shared the world with early H. Sapiens and the Denisovans.

Neanderthals lived against a backdrop of repeated Ice Ages but they were but there were lengthy warmer periods, in fact the Eemian period, centred on 100,000 years ago was warmer than today.

The first Neanderthal remains were excavated in 1812-16 but not recognised as such. The original eponymous remains were found in the Neander valley south west of Dusseldorf in 1856, a Neanderthal skull was discovered in Gibraltar in 1848 but not recognised as such until 1864. These remains entered the scientific time when (white, male) Western European scientists were eagerly trying to demonstrate the superiority of the white race and so they were seen in this light. I wonder whether, if they were discovered now, they would be considered a separate species.

The remains we have amount to several hundred individuals, including 30 or so nearly complete skeletons, DNA sampling has been done on 30 or so individuals with high resolution genomes measured for 3. The remains cover individuals from stillborn infants, through children and adolescents to adults. Individuals over 50 are rare, this is true across all of the archaeological record; estimating the age of an older individual from bones is hard, and they are more fragile. Many of the skeletons shows signs of injury and disease.

The Neanderthal bones paint a picture of a species very similar to us, a little chunkier with well-developed upper arms. They appear to have been highly mobile which reflects modern hunter-gatherer societies.

A lot has happened in Neanderthal studies since I first learned of them in the eighties. Archaeological techniques have improved greatly, isotopic analysis to tease out diet and migrations and most recently DNA analysis have brought great insights. From an archaeological point of view the earliest excavations in the mid 19th century were fairly haphazard and even after that excavation tended to focus on big bones and stone tools (lithics, as they are referred to in this book). Experimental archaeology means we have a very detailed understanding of how lithics are made.

Nowadays everything is collected in an excavation, and recorded in enormous detail. This means that, for example, lithics and stone fragments can be refitted to their core (the stone from which they were all made) which enables us to identify different “technology” strands for the production of stone tools. Neanderthal lithics were not just the result of bashing rocks together. They clearly had a very firm grasp of the qualities of the materials they used, where best to source stone, how to best process them and how to repair them. This goes way beyond the tool use of modern apes. Early H. Sapiens lithic technology is arguably more advanced but it is not night and day. It is not just stone that Neanderthals understood, they also worked with bone, animal skins, resins from birch – again very selective of the materials they used. They butchered animals to get the most nutritious and high calorie cuts. The Schöningen spears are a set of wooden Neanderthals spears preserved in sediment on the edge of an ancient lake shore dating back at least 200,000 years.

Hearths form an important part of the archaeological record for Neanderthals, in caves under appropriate conditions we can see fires that represent perhaps just a few days stay – the smoke from them is trapped in flowstone the material from which stalagmites are made. They paint a picture of small groups returning to locations over periods of thousands of years. Cave sites are central to the archaeology of Neanderthals – it wasn’t clear to me whether this is simply what is preserved (camps out in the open would be less likely to survive) or whether Neanderthals spent significant time in caves. In any case they are places of repeated visits rather than long term stays. Wragg highlights another preservation bias, we see more nearly complete skeletons than we expect and more delicate children’s bones. This suggests special treatment of the dead, there is also evidence in the form of butchery marks on Neanderthal bones suggest ritual cannibalism and very limited evidence of decoration of corpses.

Perhaps even more surprisingly there is evidence for Neanderthal art, most strikingly the Bruniquel Cave stalagmite structures dating to 176,000 years ago. There are also traces of pigments on a number of artefacts and also patterns carved into bone.

Neanderthals as a distinct group disappeared approximately 40,000 years ago, it is not clear why they died out. Prior to their extinction the DNA evidence shows that they interbred with H. Sapiens several times over a periods of many thousands of years. We retain a small percentage of Neanderthal DNA from this time. Their demise may simply have been down to chance, the humans found in Western Europe today are not the descendants of the earliest H. Sapiens found in the area – we originate from further East. Perhaps the disappearance of the Neanderthals is something similar, a chance repopulation after climatic change .

I was interested to see Jean M. Auel’s Earth’s Children novels cited a couple of times as an inspiration for Wragg and other archaeologists working on Neanderthals. I remember reading the books avidly at some point in the 1980s, Auel was clearly in advance of their time showing Neanderthals in a rather more subtle light.

I came away from Kindred with a picture of Neanderthals very similar to my distant H. Sapiens ancestors, at a glance it seems a Neanderthal and their encampments would look very similar to those of H. Sapiens. At this point I wonder whether it is valid to consider them a separate species. Are they a boxer dog to H. Sapiens border collie?

Oct 08 2025

Book review: Science and Islam – A History by Ehsan Masood

My next review is of Science and Islam: A History by Ehsan Masood. It follows on from a lot of reading I’ve done around the history of science in Western Europe and the US. It also fills a gap between books I’ve read on the Iron Age and Roman Period and the Early Modern Period. Much of the action takes place in the so called Dark Ages – a time where in my part of North West England Roman ruins were collecting pigeon droppings and little other archaeology survives!

Science and Islam is comprised of three parts, the first is an overview of the politics of the Islamic Empire from the 7th century until the Mongol invasion 13th century with an aside regarding the Tartar invasion in the 14th century. The second part covers sciences thematically. The final, shorter part, covers philosophy, the impact of Islamic science on Western European science in the 16th century and beyond and the post-colonial landscape.

Islam was founded by the Prophet Muhammad in 610CE, he died in 632CE. A series of four Caliphs built the Islamic Empire by taking over the Persian Empire and chunks of the Byzantine Empire in the following three decades. The Empire would reach Spain in 711CE.

The Umayyads were the first caliphate dynasty, they used Damascus as their capital, but were deposed by the Abbasids in 747CE who went on to found their capital in Baghdad. The Empire managed to retain a single leader, or Caliph until 909CE when the Fatamid Caliphate was established in Cairo. Subsequently a caliphate was established in Córdoba, Spain in 929CE. Each of these capitals became a seat of learning.

Science in the Islamic Empire started with a translation project commenced under the Abbasid regime in Baghdad which sought to translate scholarly works principally from Ancient Greece but also from Persia and India. It was conducted by Muslim, Christian and Jewish scholars with a focus on practical texts rather than literature – it struck me that this was echoed by the Renaissance in Western Europe some time later. The crudest translations were simply word for word transcriptions which often led to near gibberish. More thoughtful translators translated for meaning and often added their own commentary – a start to new science. The translation enterprise was boosted by the arrival of paper in Baghdad in 751CE from China.

The Islamic Empire lingered on as the Ottoman Empire until after the First World War although it had largely lost its interest in science. The golden age of the Islamic Empire ended with the Mongol invasions from the East in the 13th century. The Islamic Empire finally left Spain in 1492 although from the 13th century all that remained was the small Emirate of Granada.

The thematic chapters of Islam and Science cover medicine, astronomy, maths, chemistry and mechanical devices. The impact of Arabic scientists is visible in our language: in astronomy with star names like Aldebaran, Rigel, Betelgeuse; chemistry has alkali, alcohol, alchemy, and chemistry; maths has algebra and algorithm.

Medicine was important in the Islamic Empire, initially they followed the Greek physician Galen’s ideas which were derived from Hippocrates’ four humours model of medicine. By the 9th century some were questioning aspects of Galen’s work – his human anatomy was rather suspect since he relied on animal dissections. Later Ibn-Sina’s (latin: Avicenna) Canon of Medicine summarised all of medical knowledge from Galen but also Persian, Chinese and Indian medicine – it was in print for six centuries. Hospitals were established in the nineth century onwards and many remained open for centuries. Medical trials were seen as an accepted part of medicine.

Islamic practice makes three demands on astronomy – timing for five prayers a day, the direction to Mecca, and the 12 months of the year. Sophisticated measurement is not absolutely required for this but in practice each mosque had its own timekeeper  – a muwaqqit – so their was a lot of expertise in astronomy around, and a lot of observations were being made. More so after Ptolemy’s work on celestial motions was translated into Arabic which led Islamic astronomers to compile tables of celestial motion and compare them to Indian and Greek measurements. Ptolemy’s work is fatally flawed because it assumes a geocentric system with motion built from an ever increasing number of epicycles. The Islamic astronomers realised there were problems with this model and made some attempts to fix them but retained geocentricity. There is some evidence that Copernicus knew of this work when he proposed his heliocentric model.

As for maths, in the West we use “Arabic Numerals”, in Arabic these are referred to as “Indian Numerals” this is a result of the work of Al-Khwarizmi, who was born in 786CE. Essentially he popularised “Indian numerals” by translating Indian mathematical works. It is from him that we get “algebra”, interestingly his algebra was expressed in words not symbols, and was invented at the behest of his Caliph in an effort to simplify Islamic law around inheritance. I am bemused that mathematics, often seen as the “purist” of sciences, developed from accountancy and law. In the 11th century Omar Khayyam produced geometric solutions to cubic equations and also calculated the length of the year very precisely. Islamic scholars also developed trigonometry from the work of Greek and Indian scholars.

The chapter on chemistry talks mainly about Jabir ibn-Hayyan (latin: Geber) from the 8th century. A large number of texts are attributed to him covering many experimental methods, equipment, processes (such as distillation and reduction) as well as chemicals like sulphuric and nitric acid. In common with the Early Modern Period in Western Europe, alchemy and chemistry existed side by side.

The brothers Jafar-Muhammad, Ahmad and Al-hasan known as Banu Musa were adopted to the House of Wisdom in Baghdad under the reign of Caliph al-Mamun in the 9th century. They were involved in the translation project but went on to describe one hundred mechanical toys in their Book of Ingenious Devices – many were powered by pressurised water. The pinnacle of Islamic engineering was Badi al-Zaman al-Jazari whose 1206 book, sometimes called Automata, described how to build 50 complex automata.

The Islamic Empire had been in contact with Europe through the medieval period, one gets the impression of science in Western Europe being kickstarted by contact with the Islamic Empire as it went into decline in the 13th century. It is clear that European scholars were familiar with Arabic sources in the Early Modern Period but tended not to cite them – the strong citation culture we see in modern science is a 19th century invention.

A couple of times Masood talks about Islam being easy to follow as an adherent – although one can make sophisticated determinations of time for prayers, and the direction of Mecca it is not strictly required so the religion itself does not make great demands on science. I found this a bit puzzling since it seems to me that this is the case for most religions worshipped now. I wonder whether it is a comparison with Sumerian and Egyptian systems or whether it is to highlight that science is not a necessity to Islam.

I found this a great introduction to the medieval Islamic Empire and Islamic science in the 7th to 16th centuries. It is quite brief and readable. For me the context of the Islamic Empire was very useful since it was something of which I was completely ignorant. As a scientist I would have preferred a bit more depth to the science and scientists but with the inclusion of the background material I needed on the Islamic Empire it would have made a rather longer book.