Books To Live By With Mariella Frostrup

After escaping from the rain in Brian’s tree house hotel, Mariella sets out to discover the books that have shaped the life and brain of Britain’s favourite physicist. As a precursor to listing his choices, Brian explains the important link between the arts and the sciences, explaining how he has always combined the two fields when searching for the answers to the big questions that form the basis of his work: ‘why are we here?, what’s the meaning of life?, how did it all begin?’ This sentiment is visible in the books that Brian discusses: from the creative and futuristic tale ‘Spacecraft 2000 to 2100 AD’ by Stewart Crawley that he first read as a child, to Hofstader’s seminal ‘Godel, Escher and Bach’ which explores how the life works of a mathematician, an artist and a composer combine to produce richer understanding of human existence. Mariella dives into the genius working of Brian’s mind (or at least attempts to), discussing his book choices ‘Cosmos’ by Carl Sagan and ‘General Relativity from A to B’