Molecules

There’s a scene in Evelyn Waugh’s The Loved One in which a magazine’s advice columnist ‘the Guru Brahmin’ (in fact ‘two gloomy men and a bright young secretary’) receives yet another letter from a compulsive nail-biter: ‘What did we advise her last time?’ Mr Slump, the chain-smoking drunk, asks. ‘Meditation on the Beautiful.’ ‘Well, tell her to go on meditating.’ The opening of Paul Hawken’s Carbon gives the impression that it was dictated by the gloomy Mr Slump in response to a climate activist asking what he should think about the destruction of the planet. Tell him that ‘to better understand the riddles and luminosity of life’ he must ‘go

Harold McGee’s Nose Dive: A Field Guide to the World’s Smells is an ambitious and enormous work. Indeed it’s so large, at 654 pages and weighing nearly a kilo, that I could only manage to read it at the kitchen table — which made me appreciate its wipe-clean binding. Its distinctive new-book smell (there is such a thing) contrasts mightily with the musty, familiar old-book scent of my study. As I walk through the house, I detect the not entirely agreeable whiff of last night’s wood fire in the sitting-room, but this gives way to the snap-to-attention aroma of just-made coffee, the fragrance of the sliced banana and apple in