Uncertainty

Carlo Rovelli, the Italian theoretical physicist, is one of the great scientific explicators of our time. His wafer-thin essay collection, Seven Brief Lessons on Physics (2015), managed to clarify the unsettling uncertainties of Einsteinian relativity, quantum theory and other physical exotica. It sold more than a million copies in English translation alone. Not since Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time had there been such a consensual success in the science book market. In later bestsellers such as The Order of Time and White Holes, Rovelli continued a tradition of popular scientific writing from Galileo to Darwin that disappeared in the academic specialisations of the past century. The French call it haute vulgarisation – high-class popularisation. Rovelli excels at it.

When I met Brian Dillon in February 2023, he seemed to have a lot on his mind. We had arranged to speak about Affinities, the newly published final instalment of Essayism, his sprawling three-part survey of literature, art and aesthetics. That morning, as he sipped decaf coffee in a quiet corner of the Barbican Kitchen café in London, he still didn’t know what his book was about. ‘At this point you don’t,’ he confessed. But even though he hadn’t made up his mind about Affinities, Dillon had already begun to think about his next project. It was to be a memoir of his education, called Ambivalence. This has now come to fruition.