Christopher Bray

Three great minds explore the enigmas of the universe

A philosopher, a physicist and a fabulist are independently haunted by the difference between the world as it is in itself and the world as we experience it through our senses

Jorge Luis Borges in his office at the Biblioteca Nacional, Buenos Aires. Credit: Getty Images 
issue 12 October 2024

It sounds like a Tom Stoppard play. A big-shot philosopher meets a big-shot boffin by way of a big-shot writer to descant on the biggest of big-shot debates – what The Rigor of Angels’s subtitle calls ‘the Ultimate Nature of Reality’.True, William Egginton can’t match Stoppard for punchy one-liners, nor for puns and pratfalls and persiflage.

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