51¶¯Âþ

What links slime moulds and Gennifer Flowers’s relationship with Bill Clinton? Steven Johnson’s exhilarating Emergence (Penguin, £6.99) explains, in a wonderfully lucid account of complexity theory and the self-organising power of apparently chaotic systems. He shows how bees swarm and cities grow; why crowds need no leader to act in unison; how brainless slime moulds can figure out a maze – and the amazing truth about how America’s media bosses decided to suppress Clinton’s fling, but still saw it top the news the next night.