Fiammetta Rocco's Reading List

"It’s about algorithms. Everybody knows algorithms exist, and we more or less know sort of what they’re used for, but most readers don’t have the full picture of how algorithms work and the many, many different fields in which they appear. This is a cleverly structured book. I don’t know whether it was the author’s idea or whether she got good advice from the publisher, but it’s divided into different fields, like medicine and all sorts of other things that you can possibly think of in which algorithms will appear. She explains in incredibly clear language, with very, very good examples, just how pervasive the use of algorithms is. It’s a great book about our time. No, absolutely not. It is incredibly clearly written. It always comes back to real examples. It’s not theoretical, although she does explain the theory of how it works. None of it, though, is beyond the average reader. It’s a completely fascinating read."

"It’s the story of Oleg Gordievsky, who was probably the most important British spy in Soviet Russia since the Second World War . He was the only spy we ever had that we managed to get out of Russia and bring back to Britain alive. He’s an extremely intelligent man with a prodigious memory, who worked at a very senior level and was the provider of enormous amounts of information, all through the 1970s, the Reagan years, the Gorbachev-Reagan-Thatcher friendship, the development of glasnost, the collapse of the Soviet Union and the opening up of Russia . Although Gordievsky has written his own memoir about his years as a spy, he now lives under a new name in Britain. Nobody has ever interviewed all the British people who were involved in running the Gordievsky operation, until now. Ben Macintyre has not had access to the MI6 archives, because they are sealed. But he has been allowed to interview absolutely everyone who worked on running Gordievsky, and it’s an incredible read. It’s like a truly rip-roaring piece of the absolutely best spy fiction . He’s written a lot of books, but I think this is probably his best one."

"Here’s a story that we all grew up with. My generation can remember when it happened, 30 years ago. For much younger readers, it’s something that they will have heard about. What we’ve never really quite taken on board in this much detail is what was happening on the ground, both in the area immediately around Chernobyl, but also in Moscow: the different levels of power, how they dealt with this absolutely terrifying event, with people wanting to cover it up, to avoid blame, to try and save lives. But also having no ordered system for shutting down a disaster of this kind. It was chaos, absolute chaos, and of course, there was an enormous cover-up, because there was so much face to be lost. The book unpacks every single detail of this extraordinarily human blunder and the massive consequences that it went on to have. So it’s a tough book. Very well written, very well researched, absolutely fascinating about the end of the Soviet empire."

"Carl Zimmer’s one of a handful of extremely good science writers, one of those people who are capable of taking an immensely complex subject and, without being patronising, without talking down to the reader in any way at all, presenting a very complex argument with a lot of different material in a way that’s both incredibly clear and uncompromising in its detail and its depth. It is about heredity: how heredity changes, how complex it is, about nature versus nurture. It is just a completely fascinating, up-to-date book about that kind of science. Do you know, I found it such a refreshing exercise, to be made to read at this speed, books of this length. It makes you realise quite what a miracle the book is. It is absolutely extraordinary how many people set out to write a book, because they just can’t not write it. It becomes a lifetime’s obsession, which is what the best writing is for a period of time that you’re totally immersed in the project. The result is some quite extraordinary work, work that is structurally interesting, from a research point of view completely new, in terms of taking incredibly complex material and making it readable. It’s one of the best ways of trying to understand the mad, crazy world that we live in. I’d say nonfiction is in very good shape in 2018."