The Senses
Anne Enright remarked to a packed house at the London Review Bookshop that she advised writing students to include at least one of the senses in each of their sentences if they wanted to engage their readers. Here's our eclectic pick of books that explore sight, hearing, touch, taste, smell - and a ‘sixth sense’.
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£11.25
A Natural History of the Senses
Diane Ackerman’s strange and wonderful book takes the human senses as a springboard for a series of digressive essays about how we perceive the world. Though rooted in science, Ackerman’s account of the sensual world is written with a poet’s sensibility and enlivened with fascinating and sometime... See details
£14.99
Taste: A New Way to Cook
Sybil Kapoor’s genuinely innovative cookbook approaches food from a physiological viewpoint. Following recent discoveries in neuroscience, she identifies five basic tastes – sweet, sour, bitter, salt and umami (savoury) – and, devoting a chapter to each of them, teaches us how to create dishes an... See details
£6.99
The Book of Salt
The narrator of Monique Truong’s first novel is Binh, exiled from French Indochina because of his homosexuality, and the cook for Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas during their residence in Paris. Throughout, food and cooking are the central metaphors: ‘Rarely have the properties, the symbolism ... See details
£7.99
Perfume: The Story of A Murderer
Jean-Baptiste Grenouille, abandoned as a child in the streets of 18th-century Paris, discovers that he has a superhuman sense of smell, while entirely lacking any personal odour of his own. In a quest to create the perfect perfume, Grenouille embarks on a career of serial murder, stealing the sce... See details
£8.99
The Secret of Scent
Luca Turin is a biologist by training and a passionate connoisseur of perfumes. His book is both a personal account of his relationship with scent and scents, and a tightly argued thesis that the way that scientists have understood the sense of smell to work is simply wrong. As well as hard scien... See details
£8.99
The Eye
In this ‘richly enjoyable’ (the Spectator) tour around the natural history of vision, Simon Ings provides both a potted history of how the eye evolved and a thorough survey of how it works. His account is amply fleshed out with historical and scientific anecdotes. See details
£17.50
On Touching
Derrida’s study of the work of his student Jean-Luc Nancy is also a comprehensive survey of the philosophy of touch, from Plato and Aristotle to the present. It is one of Derrida’s most important books, and one of his most characteristic – simultaneously personal and detached. See details
£16.99
How We Hear Music
Sir James Beament was an entomologist and zoologist with a passionate interest in music. Here he argues that the evolutionary history of our sense of hearing has an important role to play in our understanding of how music works. ‘Informed by a broad expertise comprehending all of the disciplines ... See details
£18.99
The Auditory Culture Reader
This multidisciplinary collection of essays examines the place of sound in our culture and society, drawing on anthropology, history, sociology and ethnomusicology. Included here are Paul Moore on the sounds of sectarianism in Northern Ireland, Cora Bender on the ‘Powwow’ of the Ojibwa and Steven... See details
£25.00
The Senses in Late Medieval England
Though the physiological and neurological bases of the senses have remained fairly constant across human history, their cultural contexts have varied widely. In this copiously documented survey of how people saw, heard, smelt, tasted and felt in the Middle Ages, Woolgar argues that our modern not... See details
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