Three great minds explore the enigmas of the universe

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. But while his book is as demanding a read as anything published this year, it still leaves you smiling. Over and over again the author reminds you of the shimmering weirdness beneath the experiential surface of what we are pleased to call the real world.

There is no shortage of books that pit one thinker against another to tell the history of an argument. Keynes and Hayek, Leonardo and Michelangelo, Camus and Sartre: the shelves warp with accounts of heavyweight dialectic duels. Egginton, though, has a rather different story to tell. His brainboxes never met.