Paul McGarr

Anyone living in Tower Hamlets is used to the east London borough being at the centre of political storms.

From the fight against the fascist National Front in the 1970s, through the Wapping printers’ strikes and dock strikes in the 1980s, the battle against the Nazi British National Party (BNP) in the 1990s, to the electoral success of the Respect Coalition in the wake of the anti-war movement, it is not a place where you expect a quiet political life.

Stephen Jay Gould was one of the most important evolutionary theorists since Charles Darwin. His enormous final work, The Structure of Evolutionary Theory, was published shortly before his death in 2002 and will long remain a key text for understanding the natural world and its development. The prominent left wing biologist Steven Rose argues that Gould's book represents "perhaps the most important advance in evolutionary theory since Darwin wrote The Origin of Species".

I first read this little book many years ago. Yet I had forgotten how engagingly well written it was, and how stimulating, until I reread the new edition. What is History? began life as a series of lectures delivered in 1961, before then being broadcast on BBC radio and then turned into this book.