I can only presume that this book was either titled for an American audience more familiar with doughnuts than biscuits, or that the alliterative version of the title was considered to be more eye catching everywhere. There’s really very little about dunking doughnuts here but there is plenty of other stuff to read

Each chapter of the book delves into a different branch of science approaching it from the point of view of everyday life. If you already have an idea about the branch of science in question then the insights here can seem a bit obvious and predictable. His chapter on statistics which is wrapped up in how to add up your supermarket bill struck me as the weakest in the book but I suspect that is just because I already knew the things he was talking about.

There’s a lot here that would make really good fodder for science teachers. I really enjoyed learning things I didn’t know about boomerangs and the science of cooking, and even the physics of sex. It’s a good entertainingly written book; the split into nine separate questions about everyday life means that on the one hand we never get too deep into science but we never get bored either.

My favourite chapter is the one about boiling eggs which explains why I can never get my eggs to cook in the standard three and a half minutes (time to cook is proportional to the inverse square of the radius - the three and a half minutes is for a rather small egg and i buy the best free range medium eggs i can find - so mine need about five minutes) and that if I was foolhardy enough to boil eggs in methanol I could get perfect eggs every time because the temperature that methanol boils at is between the temperature that the white and the yolk cook at.

Anyway, back to the title story: the main focus of the first chapter is about dunking biscuits in tea, something I’m rather fond of doing. Fisher concludes that to dunk a biscuit properly you have to do it horizontally rather than vertically. The biscuit can then take up to four times as long in the tea before collapsing. A layer of nice plastic-like chocolate on top helps too. I’ve tried to repeat his experiments and have just one problem. How the bloody hell do you hold a biscuit horizontally in a mug of tea? It might be scientifically sound but it seems to be impossible in practice. Can I sue for compensation for my tea scorched fingers?