You start with Primo Levi, who is famous for his memories of Auschwitz. He worked in the labs there, as a prisoner, and that’s how he avoided the gas. But you’ve chosen another of his books, The Periodic Table, which uses the chemical elements as a framework for a series of short stories.

They’re a mixture of short stories and autobiographical essays, or essays in autobiography. Levi uses the elements from the periodic table as a way of organising memory. He uses 21 elements, each as a doorway or wormhole into a particular area of his experience, into a particular memory – but leaving out his time in Auschwitz, because he’d already written about that. You get his early interest in chemistry, his early experiments, the friends he studied with, the atmosphere of the laboratories and the characters of the professors who taught him. It’s about his interest in matter, the stuff the world is made of, as counterposed to spirit. He wrote another great book, The Wrench, which is a series of soliloquies from a mechanic called Faussone. Levi is the scribe as Faussone describes all these things he’s built – bridges, oil derricks – and the excitement of putting things together. In The Periodic Table, you also get that fascination with the stuff the world’s made of and we’re made of – the wonder of it.

I’m watching a TV series at the moment about a high-school chemistry teacher who winds up cooking crystal meth. He tells his students that chemistry is about the study of transformation.

Levi is fascinated with how elements react, with the way they become salts and oxides and so on. There are a lot of transformations happening, which I suppose strikes a chord with the personal transformations of grief, separation, longing, love, friendship. That’s most obviously brought out in the final story, titled “Carbon”, which is really the story of one carbon atom. It might start inside a human being and then go into a tree, a pencil, a glass of milk, and then re-enter the bloodstream, become a nerve cell, a neuron. There’s this extraordinary moment at the end, where he imagines the carbon atom in the part of his brain that’s deciding whether to write one word rather than another. It’s a brilliant conceptual leap, that the abstraction of what he’s writing becomes the concrete matter on the page. He’s bringing together these two worlds – the inward world of the imagination or intelligence, and the outward, concrete world of books, trees and bodies.

Next is Father and Son by the poet and critic Edmund Gosse. We were talking about the ego and how autobiography can transcend it. But in this autobiography, a son – the author – explicitly throws off the influence of his brilliant father. Isn’t that close to the archetype of egotism?

There are autobiographies that are fantastically egotistical, but they tend to be not very good books. The universal is in the small. You write about your own life, but if you write about it with enough love and care then it will have the universal running through it. This book is a good illustration. It’s alive with specificity but it’s full of the universal – fathers and sons, children growing up and outstripping their parents. The book is subtitled “A Study of Two Temperaments”. Gosse’s father, Philip Henry Gosse, was an eminent zoologist in the mid-19th century. But he was also a member of a Christian sect called the Plymouth Brethren, fundamentalists who thought that the Bible was literal truth. When Darwin published On the Origin of Species in 1859, this was a huge intellectual crisis for Philip Gosse. His instinct as a scientist was to recognise the truth of what Darwin said, but his instinct as a Christian was to deny it.

Much of Edmund Gosse's early view of the world is blinded by this oppressive faith, but he eventually steps outside his father’s authority, outside his sway. And while most of the book is written with a quiet attention to detail, with a patience and respect for concrete things, it ends with a polemical passage against religious fundamentalism that wouldn’t look out of place as a memorial to the dead at ground zero in New York. He writes:

“It divides heart from heart. It sets up a vain, chimerical ideal, in the barren pursuit of which all the tender, indulgent affections, all the genial play of life, all the exquisite pleasures and soft resignations of the body, all that enlarges and calms the soul, are exchanged for what is harsh and void and negative. It encourages a stern and ignorant spirit of condemnation; it throws altogether out of gear the healthy movement of the conscience; it invents virtues which are sterile and cruel; it invents sins which are no sins at all, but which darken the heaven of innocent joy with futile clouds of remorse. There is something horrible, if we will bring ourselves to face it, in the fanaticism that can do nothing with this pathetic and fugitive existence of ours but treat it as if it were the uncomfortable ante-chamber to a palace which no one has explored and of the plan of which we know absolutely nothing.”