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Instability Rules: The ten most amazing ideas of modern science by Charles Flowers, John Wiley, $18.50, ISBN 0471380423

THERE’S no shortage of books that have visited the ports that Charles Flowers visits. It’s a daunting itinerary: his 10 ideas stretch from the big bang and the expanding Universe, through the ponderous movement of continents to Freud and the unconscious, via the human genome and artificial intelligence. It sounds like an exhausting course to follow in Flowers’s wake and it might seem too much to attempt.

That would be a mistake. Take one section at a time and the whole journey will seem like a holiday with a companion who is anxious to inform but who is well aware that if you get bored you might jump ship during the night. So he writes in language that is simple, even colloquial when he thinks fit, and always genial. The scientists are referred to, of course, but they are not given biographies. An allusion, a short anecdote, a relevant quotation do more to illuminate them as human beings than reciting CVs.

It’s unusual for a book about science to mention The Iliad, St Augustine and Beryl Bainbridge, but they show the width of context that is much of the book’s attraction. For its clarity and wit, this a winner.