What's on my bedside table: Oliver Sacks

Oliver Sacks was born in 1933 in London, England into a family of physicians and scientists. He earned his medical degree at Oxford University (Queen's College), and did residencies and fellowship work at Mt. Zion Hospital in San Francisco and at UCLA. Since 1965, he has lived in New York, where he is a practicing neurologist.

Sacks is perhaps best known for his collections of case histories from the far borderlands of neurological experience, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and An Anthropologist on Mars, in which he describes patients struggling to live with conditions ranging from Tourette's syndrome to autism, parkinsonism, musical hallucination, epilepsy, phantom limb syndrome, schizophrenia, retardation, and Alzheimer's disease.

The Devil’s Doctor by Philip Ball

The Devil's Doctor: Paracelsus and the World of Renaissance Magic and Science, to give the book its’ full title, is an exploration of the life and times of one of the most fascinating figures of scientific history: Philip Theophrastus Aureolus Bombastus von Hohenheim, known to later ages as Paracelsus.

A contemporary of Luther, he was an enemy of established medicine, scourge of the universities, an army surgeon and an alchemist. Myths about him - from his treating diseases from beyond the grave in mid-nineteenth century Salzburg to his Faustian bargain with the devil to regain his youth - have been far more lasting than his actual story. Even during his lifetime, he was rumoured to travel with a magical white horse and to store the elixir of life in the pommel of his sword. But who was Paracelsus and what did he really believe and practice? Although Paracelsus has been seen as both a charlatan and as a founder of modern science, Philip Ball's book reveals a more richly complex man - who used his eyes and ears to learn from nature how to heal, and who wrote influential books on medicine, surgery, alchemy and theology while living a drunken, combative, vagabond life. Above all, Ball reveals a man who was a product of his time - an age of great change in which the church was divided and the classics were rediscovered - and whose bringing together of the seemingly diverse disciplines of alchemy and biology signalled the beginning of the age of rationalism.

The Emerald Planet by David Beerling

The Emerald Planet: How Plants Changed Earth's History is a fascinating history of the discovery of fossils and the inferences that can be drawn from them. In it, Beerling reveals the extraordinary story of plant evolution and plants' subsequent enormous impact on life on our planet, drawing on botany, geo-chemistry and a number of other scientific disciplines to explain, in easily-digested, clearly-written terms, that plant life was – and is- one of the major prompters of climate change.

The Oxford English Dictionary

Possibly the world’s definitive dictionary, it can make for fascinating reading. With the might of the Oxford University Press behind it, with its associated origins of the foundation of the university and the dawn of printing and its 355,000 words, phrases and definitions, it really is the ultimate reference work.