One of two new titles in Thames & Hudson’s ‘Big Idea’ series, this lucid analysis lays out the debate surrounding the escalating costs, both financial and ethical, of medicine in the modern world.

It has become habitual to think of our relationship with energy as one of transition: with wood superseded by coal, coal by oil, oil by nuclear and then at some future point all replaced by green sources. Jean-Baptiste Fressoz’s devastating but unnervingly entertaining book shows what an extraordinary delusion this is. Far from the industrial era passing through a series of transformations, each new phase has in practice remained almost wholly entangled with the previous one.

Indeed the ver...

The fastest way to grasp the basics of genetics and evolution