Seeing Further: The Story of Science, Discovery, and the Genius of the Royal Society (edited by Bill Bryson)

Bought this book as some sort of a Diwali gift to myself by way of redemption of credit card points.
When I had originally added it to my mental purchase list, I had thought the book was authored by Bryson, but then later discovered he has only edited the book and that various chapters are written by different people.

The writers are themselves well known in the area of science/writing on science (Atwood, Gleick, Dawkins, Barrow, etc). Should be a good read