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1. A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson, Doubleday

2. The Fly in the Cathedral by Brian Cathcart, Viking/Penguin

3. Backroom Boys by Francis Spufford, Faber and Faber

4. The Hedgehog, the Fox and the Magister’s Pox by Stephen Jay Gould, Jonathan Cape/Random House

5. Our Final Century by Martin Rees, Heinemann/Random House

6. Magic Universe by Nigel Calder, Oxford University Press

7. Tomorrow’s People by Susan Greenfield, Allen Lane/Penguin

8. Einstein’s Clocks, Poincaré’s Maps by Peter Galison, Hodder and Stoughton

9. Information by Hans Christian Von Baeyer, Weidenfeld & Nicolson

10. Growing Up with Lucy by Steve Grand, Weidenfeld & Nicolson

Information supplied by Heffers, Cambridge (fax 01223 568591), for bestsellers in popular science first published in hardback or paperback in the UK within the past year.

As Cambridge emerged from its Fenland fogs into sunshine, eclectic was the word of the month – locally eclectic, anyway. The Fly in the Cathedral is a Cambridge story; Martin Rees is a Cambridge lad; many of the backroom boys of Francis Spufford’s title probably passed through the city on the river Granta…and the literary publication of that name helped make Bill Bryson famous.