Chasing the Sun, By Richard Cohen

Everything under the sun - and in it, too

It's rather difficult to classify this one.

It's a history book, I suppose, but tells many different histories. It includes the history of the sun's place in mythology, taking in Stonehenge, the Pyramids, the Incas, and Christianity; the history of scientific discoveries including heliocentrism, sunspots, the sun's age and the nuclear fission at its core; and even histories of how the sun has been represented in literature and music.

Richard Cohen is astonishingly well-read, referencing everything from Heraclitus and St Augustine to Isaac Asimov and Michael Caine's autobiography. There are splendid pictures of solar flares, eclipses and auroras. It's a book to dip in rather than read straight through, but each dip is pleasurable and enlightening.