Clegg has an amiable, easy style; he chats us through complex ideas rather than lecturing to us. Like other good science populists (Isaac Asimov springs immediately to mind), he explores his subject through narrative and anecdote: hanging discussions of infinity onto their historical development puts flesh onto what might easily be dry bones in other writers' hands, and so we have a tour of fascinating personalities and slices of history, a subject breathed into life.Brian Clegg has just had me revisiting areas of mathematics I haven't even considered since university. And I enjoyed it. ~ We human beings have trouble with infinity. Philosophers and mathematicians have gone mad contemplating its nature and complexity – and yet it is a concept now routinely used by schoolchildren. In this highly entertaining and stimulating history, Brian Clegg takes us on a tour of that borderland between the extremely large and the ultimate, from Archimedes counting the grains of sand...

I have to be honest, I absolutely loved Brian Clegg’s  A Brief History of Infinity , which was one of the first books I reviewed for this site nearly ten years ago (can’t believe it’s so long!), so I was a little wary about this book – especially as it is illustrated. I’m no fan of the illustrated form, which so often seems a way of filling pages cheaply. To be fair to Oliver Pugh, he does an excellent job, and the illustrations in this format are so integral to the look and feel that no one could accuse them of being padding. They add richness to the content that helps the reader absorb the content: I’m going to look out for more in this series. As for the text itself, it is rather simplified when compared with the full length book. It isn’t possible to get the same level of entertaining detail, nor to really explain some of the more obscure aspects of the study of infinity. However, in all fairness, the  Introducing  book does a very good job of opening the ...