A poet, novelist, philosopher and medical scientist, Raymond Tallis has the skill-set of a true renaissance man, and is the ideal person to tackle the wondrous "muddle of embodiment". Tasked by his editor to write a book on the body, Tallis wisely limited himself to our crowning glory, the head. Or as Tallis puts it: "the sheer oddity of our headedness". But this is not an excuse for yet another book on that supposedly most complex of structures - the brain. According to Tallis, that organ is "absurdly overrated". Instead he attempts something more subtle: an account of selfhood and consciousness rooted in the physical experience of our heads. This wonderfully evocative series of meditations on self, being and experience is witty and wise in equal measure. There are some suitably heady facts, too. For instance, we produce about 30,000 litres of saliva in a lifetime, and emotional tears are chemically distinct from those prompted by pain. From secretions to snogging to the Glasgow kiss, a truly mind-expanding voyage around the head.