Pippa Goldschmidt

A unexpected quality, at once refined, maverick and committed, is given to the the term polymath in the work of Pippa Goldschmidt. She has written as much about exploration of psychic space in Freud and Lacan as about the astrological and intergalactic type. In her wonderful new book Night Vision she writes about her formation as an astrophysicist, and her description and history of anti-colonial outer space exploration is a reassuringly politicised view of the physical universe, free of the usual Hollywood astro-fantasies.