THE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER BOOKLIST

It is now 40 years since the British newspaper the Sunday Times launched its first bestseller lists for books. Since then, such lists have been a standard feature of the publishing landscape, both in the U.K. and elsewhere.

Which books and authors have been the most popular since then? The Stieg Larsson trilogy, Dan Brown, Bill Bryson, Adrian Mole, and Frank McCourt are all in the top 100, as are one-offs such as Sophie's World, Bravo Two Zero and Life of Pi. But the clear winner is A Brief History of Time, published in 1988 and written by a Cambridge University theoretical physicist suffering from motor neurone disease called Stephen Hawking. It was on the bestseller list for more than five years and sold more than 10 million copies. A remarkable outcome for a book charting the history of cosmology and relativity.

I read the book shortly after it came out. Well, some of it. I think I got to chapter 3 fairly easily, struggled in chapter 4 and then gave up in chapter 5, the reason being that I no longer understood what Professor Hawking was saying. That was despite having a first class honours degree in mathematics from Oxford University, where my special subject had been in (you guessed it) relativity!

I say that not to blow my own trumpet, but to highlight something I have always found odd about the book. If someone with my background couldn't understand it, what chance would there have been for the average member of the general public? A Brief History of Time may well have been the best-selling book in the U.K. during the past 40 years; I suspect it may also have been the least read.

Walter Blotscher