In conversations – serious, humorous, ironic, ribald – internationally acclaimed poet-scientist Douglas Livingstone and leading literary critic Michael Chapman struck up a warm, at times iconoclastic friendship. Over lunch they exchanged opinions, insights and anecdotes, not only on poetry, science and society, but also on personal aspects of modern life: love and loss, sexual and spiritual intimations, and city living; generally, on the value of our `uncommon humanity’.

Their conversations – recollected in this book – take readers through the black-and-white times of political turbulence in South Africa of the 1970s and 1980s to a climate, after apartheid, more attuned to Livingstone’s abiding concern: how, as both scientist and poet, to heal the Earth, our only home.

Along the way, we meet a cast from Jan Smuts, Mohandas Gandhi and Albert Luthuli to Alan Paton, Mazisi Kunene, Breyten Breytenbach and the `Soweto’ poets. We shift abruptly from Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka to the TV soap, Dallas.With clarity and wit, Michael Chapman intersperses the conversations with a fresh consideration of a unique achievement: Douglas Livingstone’s journey into the `two cultures’ of art and science.