Newton's Sleep: Two Cultures and Two Kingdoms

Raymond Tallis Macmillan, £15.99, pp 260 ISBN 0 333 63300 8

The educated public, argues Raymond Tallis in the first half of his collection of essays on the philosophy of science and art, can no longer plead ignorance of science. Like C P Snow before him, he deplores a national culture which sanctions scientific naivete, an education system which he holds responsible, and a political arena where power is concentrated in the hands of those educated only in the humanities (“innumeracies,” to use Tallis's irreverent term).

Much of his argument is a bitter attack on “second order humanist intellectuals,” who in his eyes are science's arrogant and unworthy detractors. He depicts intellectually lazy English dons, cosy in ivory towers among the self generated …