Illustration by Malte Mueller

Thirty books to help us understand the world in 2020

The climate crisis, gender, populism, big tech, pandemics, race… our experts recommend titles to illuminate the issues of the day

Anne Applebaum, Michael Mann, Jeffrey Boakye, Helen Lewis, Laura Spinney, John Naughton

Sunday 18 October 2020

Michael E Mann on the environment

A distinguished climatologist and geophysicist, Michael Mann is director of the Earth System Science Center at Pennsylvania State University. He is the author of more than 200 peer-reviewed and edited publications, as well as four books, including 2012’s The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars and his forthcoming The New Climate War: The Fight to Take Back Our Planet, due out in January 2021 (Public Affairs Books).

My hero / Terry Pratchett by Helen Lewis

Terry Pratchett

My hero: 

Terry Pratchett by Helen Lewis

‘I feel part of a tight-knit community of nerds who have only just begun to miss him’ : a fan pays tribute to the author who died yesterday

Friday 13 March 2015

N

o subject was too big for Terry Pratchett, who died on Thursday – once he’d found a way to make it ridiculous. He took on capitalism, religion, sexism, war, death and why you should never buy food from a man with a tray in the street. His books wore their learning lightly, sweeping the reader along on a river of bad puns, self-deprecating footnotes and weird scenarios constructed with impeccable internal logic. Over the course of more than 40 novels, his Discworld series evolved into something much richer and darker than perhaps even he initially expected. Fittingly for someone who spent his final years talking about the need for reform in assisted dying legislation, Pratchett’s best-loved character was Death, an imposing skeleton – who rode a white horse called Binky and spoke IN SMALL CAPS. It was in the persona of Death that Pratchett’s Twitter account announced: “AT LAST, SIR TERRY, WE MUST WALK TOGETHER.”