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I found Paul J. Nahin’s Duelling Idiots and other Probability Puzzlers (Princeton, £13.95) a lot of fun, even while skipping most of the equations (now, hopefully, with all the first-edition misprints corrected). Ice-cold certainty replaces probability in Richard B. Alley’s The Two-Mile Time Machine (also Princeton, £12.95), which analyses the Earth’s secret climatic history through ice cores drilled in Greenland by the US. Shame that a continuing cold war in glaciology leaves him scant room to discuss Russia’s Antarctic cores, which came first.