Initially the dialogue was clever, but it became relentlessly clever, and I said wearily, okay Martin, you win, you've more than proved yourself, now leave me in peace.

It was okay because I found an antidote in the search for an explanation for prime numbers.

I went back to the …

The most gripping book I've read so far on my two week holiday is Marcus du Sautoy's Music of the Primes. These types of books are destined to be described as a 'fascinating journey'. It was, how shall I put it? A fascinating journey through the drama and personalities of …

Well I brought a whole lot of books to Charlestown. I've been haunting the cafés and restaurants carrying a copy of Anthony Trollope's Dr. Thorne. I always enjoy reading Trollope. I wonder if I can describe to you why?

The guy's a liberal, he has a liberal attitude. These days …

Warning: First world problem alert!

One of the amazing things about In Search Of Lost Time is how many of Proust's observations of how the mind and memory work are now shown to be scientifically correct.

I remember in the mid-eighties watching Miami Vice as a child. Maybe eighty-five or …

I've come across some good maths puzzles recently. I thought I'd list them so that I don't forget them.

• St Petersburg Paradox
• Google interview question: Proportion of boys and girls
• Google interview question: One shot or two out of three shots?

With the EU elections on Thursday, I realize I've got to get my head round it all and decide who I'm voting for. The BANES website tells me that I'm in the South West Region, which returns six members. Voting is by Regional List, where the parties are given members …

Following on from Proust On Memes:

A powerful idea communicates some of its power to the man who contradicts it. Partaking of the universal community of minds, it infiltrates, grafts itself on to, the mind of him whom it refutes,among other contiguous ideas, with the aid of which, counter …

Reading In A Budding Grove. Proust writes about what strikes me as competing memes:

in the communal life that is led by our ideas in the enclosure of our minds, there is a single one of those that makes us most happy which has not first sought, like a real …