MY SIX BEST BOOKS
ROBERT NEWMAN, 52, is best known for The Mary Whitehouse Experience show and his partnership with David Baddiel. His latest book Neuropolis: A Brain Science Survival Guide (William Collins, £20) is out now. The series is on Radio 4 on Tuesdays. ARE YOU AN ILLUSION? by Mary Midgley Routledge, £14.99 Midgley is our greatest living philosopher and a lively and sharp writer. This takes issue with all the pseudo-science about how you don’t really exist or have free will. It led me to doing The Brain Show which then became Neuropolis.
THE PANDA’S THUMB by Stephen Jay Gould
Out of print A collection of essays by a wonderful writer. He talks about evolutionary biology but also the politics of science. He’ll discuss an important type of snail shell but bring in Mozart and baseball so it’s a rich mix. Just very humane. ABSENCE OF MIND by Marilynne Robinson Yale, £10.99 These essays say we are not such empty creatures as we are presented in brain science. I got a 15-minute sketch about Phineas Gage out of this. He was a railroad worker who had an iron bar driven through his skull in an accident, which made him shout and swear.
It was said that it showed that the prefrontal cortex is responsible for self-control but Robinson says maybe he was swearing because of how he felt about it. WAR AND PEACE by Leo Tolstoy Vintage, £10.99 I’ve read this four times. As a student I got impatient and threw it into the neighbour’s garden. But I climbed over the fence and started it again. All human life is there.
TABLE-TALK by William Hazlitt
Out of print Hazlitt is the best essayist in the English language. Before I was married I spent a lot of time reading in cafes and so did Hazlitt.
This covers everything from bare-knuckle fights to paintings.
NO ORDINARY TIME by Doris Kearns Goodwin
Out of print A biography of Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt describing how Eleanor was the first to make a role of being First Lady. She had a news column, she pushed for civil rights and was FDR’s eyes and ears. He was the most Left-wing president but also the most blue-blooded.