The Address Book packs an awful lot of fascinating stuff into a small space

This readably personal slice of popular science left me feeling very small. In just over 200 pages Tim Radford, multiple award-winning science journalist, tries to locate himself - and by extension all puny humans - in the universe.

As his shaping concept he takes the habit of countless schoolboys who, asked to write their address in an exercise book, scrawl not just their house number, street name, town and county, but also their country, continent, hemisphere, planet and so on. An early clue that this will be a fun ride comes when Radford moans that postcodes have ruined the romance of addresses.

He starts off with the history of his own 19th-century house in Hastings, pointing out that it belongs just as much to past and future occupants as it does to him. The sense of impermanence and happenstance in a human life is underlined when he reveals that, during the year it took him to complete the chapter, he actually moved to Eastbourne. Born in New Zealand but long resident here, he also has an ambivalent and romantic idea of "home". He ignored the dramatic landscapes of his Auckland boyhood but his image of England is derived in large part from literature.

As well as novels and poetry, Radford draws on the Bible and on a pretty sound knowledge of history and philosophical thought, to show how humans identify themselves and how towns and nations form. There are superb chapters on the quantification of time and distance and mass in relation to the Earth, and on the tendency to think in terms of hemispherical opposites - East and West, Christianity and Islam, the developed and undeveloped world.

But the book is strongest on physical science.

Radford tells us how Sussex chalk came into being, and how tectonic shifts created the continents.

Zooming out, he paints an almost cinematically vivid picture of the way the Earth was formed, accreting smaller bits of space detritus to itself and shaped by the battering of asteroids until it developed the unique conditions for human life. Or are they unique? Radford's potted history of space exploration holds out the hope of life, or at least rain, on Saturn's moon, Titan.

Radford packs an awful lot of fascinating stuff into a small space, but towards the end, as he delves into the extremes of the universe, describing processes that are unimaginably huge or unimaginably small, he lost me. And if there's an obvious criticism of his book it's that it's neither pure science nor pure personal reflection.

A bit of a curate's egg. Or as Radford, with his enviably precise command of language and terminology might put it, an oblate spheroid with a bulge around the equator.