I chose this book because it’s written by a physicist, very elderly now, who has spent all his life working in controlled fusion. The title is a take on Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth . The first part of the book is Chen claiming that fusion is indispensable for our future, and why. He has a very readable section on climate change, a section on fossil fueled energy and a section on renewables—in which I disagree with him strongly, because he denigrates solar energy—and then goes on to say that we need fusion.

It’s short. About 50 pages. I don’t agree with everything she says because, despite her interlocutor and friend being homosexual, she makes a few homophobic comments. I chose this book because it’s witty and fun, it raises some fundamental questions about the nature of love, and also it’s a fascinating insight into society at the time.

Hamilton – I disagree with him much more than I agree with him. This book is very much a book about a father and a son. The father is painted as the bad guy, and the son is the good guy, struggling to break free. I don’t accept that interpretation, or that framework of analysis. Nonetheless, Hamilton writes with a verve, an electricity, a passion, that’s rare among academic historians. As a researcher, he’s extraordinary.

This is an odd choice because I disagree with almost all his conclusions. He argues that the reign of Augustus sees the Roman élite finally dealing with the problems of the Greek culture that they love and the nasty Greeks they rule. He’s just wrong. They don’t. They carry on loving the culture and despising Greeks. I don’t agree with his methods. He doesn’t argue things. He just tells you stuff.