The Mystery of Things by AC Grayling

Hitler's aesthetics of power and Goering's looted art treasures, the artistic achievement and formidable engineering skills of ancient Mesopotamia, the Faustian excesses of contemporary architecture, multicultural relativism and patriotic elitism, Shakespeare, Goethe, what makes history and the Bible's lack of it, Freud, Moses, Edward Said, how ideas can shape history but sociology doesn't understand ideas, why extraterrestrials aren't science, and the theory that unifies relativity and quantum mechanics: these are only a handful of the topics that the philosopher AC Grayling contends with in this polymath's feast of a miscellany.

You could do far worse than spend an evening or three in the company of this book. Like good conversation, it engages you in a flow of topics without ever pausing long enough to bore. The essays and reviews are succinct, informative and always reasonable. You can almost imagine one of the 18th-century salon women Grayling so admires acting as his guiding spirit. The order of essays parallels the order of evenings and guests - arts, history, science - and with a similar purpose in mind. That purpose is enlightenment. Ignorance must be banished.

In a sense, Grayling's title is misleading. This collection is not so much about the mystery of things as their sheer diversity. Awe is rarely Grayling's principal emotion. Though he values and is interested in art, understanding beauty or harmony is not what he's after. He's more interested in art's social and historical moment, the ideas and experience embodied in it, the uses to be made of it. His favourite position is not on his knees, certainly not before that other creation he understands as pre-eminently human - the deity.

The updated edition of Stephen Hawking's record-breaking A Brief History of Time, once applauded, now meets with his disapproval. Hawking has carelessly called on God. He has a lot to answer for, since "he could find no better rhetorical flourish to end his book than the remark that if we could explain why the universe exists we would 'know the mind of God'". Grayling underlines that throughout history "religions have been the most destructive and threatening of social phenomena, often irrational and frequently oppressive and violent."

Voltaire would be a favourite guest in Grayling's salon: the philosophe "often remarked that he loved the man who seeks truth but hated the man who claims to have found it. There are no prizes for guessing which was the scientist, which was the priest." Like a latter-day philosophe, Grayling has pedagogic passion. He would like to rip philosophy from what Hazlitt called the "labyrinths of intellectual abstraction" and bring it back into the daily lives of all educated people. In that sense, these essays are material for reflection.

The aim is laudable. If there's sometimes a gap between it and the substance, then perhaps it's because everyday journalism in our own times rarely lends itself to that deeper kind of reflection, nor indeed provokes it. Outrage at the architect Norman Foster for putting steel and glass where Grayling doesn't think it belongs only just rises above tabloid headlines.

Breadth rather than depth is what this collection offers. Given that this breadth includes such tantalising titbits as the translation of an Egyptian hieroglyph for relief as "washing of the heart"; and one emanating from the mouth of a woman enjoying intercourse as "Calm is the desire of my heart", breadth may be a good start.

Lisa Appignanesi's novel 'The Memory Man' is due from Arcadia in May