Oxford University Press has a long and distinguished history of producing popular science books that sound as if they are going to be brilliant, but turn out to disappoint. Often this is because the author is a scientist who knows his subject, but doesn’t really know how to communicate it to the general reader. Seeing Through Illusions is a classic case of this phenomenon. The premise is superb. Using optical illusions and what they reveal to explore the workings of human sight and perception. But sadly it is a wasted opportunity. It’s revealing that the first actual optical illusion in the book doesn’t come to the colour plates have way through. There’s page after page of context and explanation without ever showing us an optical illusion – the reader is desperately wanting to see one and we just keep getting comments on them without the actual things. When they do crop up they are little more than listed, with plenty of jargon but little relevance to the structure of the text....