Suffering from a severe (is there any other?) form of Man Flu, I picked this up and devoured it in two days. If I had wanted to write such a book I would have constructed it in the same way as Mr Pretor-Pinney using a mixture of science, religion, history, philosophy and art, well-written in a lively fashion and glued together with liberal dashes of humour. Starting with Chapter One, cumulus, my febrile brain was buffeted from children's drawings to John Constable to René Descartes to Hindu and Buddhist beliefs about elephants, learning in the process that a cumulus cloud weighs the same as eighty elephants, to lava lamps and then on and on. I felt rather like what poor Lt.-Col. William Rankin must have felt, that is the exhilaration and not the pain, when he was obliged to bail out at 47,000 ft above a cumulonimbus in Chapter Two. Even the ostensibly boring stratus and the often frankly depressing nimbostratus managed to shine in these pages before I surged to the upper troposphere, with a detour to Billingsgate Market for the mackerel sky version of cirrocumulus, and beyond. A veritable tour de force.
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