My favourite school textbook is (unsurprisingly) the one that I used at school: Chemistry in Context by Graham Hill and John Holman. The school textbooks being published today are often tied in so closely to Exam Syllabuses and written in such a short space of time, that they end up looking like a nicely illustrated and slightly more detailed version of the Syllabus.

University textbooks are a different kettle of fish. This time I have no allegiance to the ones I read (or tried to read!) at university, namely Atkins, Cotton and Wilkinson, Greenwood and Earnshaw and March. Has anyone in the world read all four of these monsters cover-to-cover. One very good university textbook that I have read cover-to-cover is the American text ‘Braving the Elements’ by Gray, Simon and Trogler. It gets my vote in the university category.