Red Rag to a Bull! and other fallacies explored pretty much reviews itself:

• "Experts are valuable people in their own field, but when they stray into other areas of knowledge ... they are as susceptible to error as anybody else."
• "The fact that [the Astronomer Royal for Scotland] gave credence to Taylor's intrinsically unbelievable speculations is a warning to ordinary citizens that, although they can justifiably attend to what scholars may say about the subjects in which they are qualified to express an opinion, such scholars may be as gullible as anybody else on topics in which their opinion is no more valuable than yours or mine."

Dr Pyke's qualifications were in nutrition, so what he has to say about that in this book is probably sound.

There is really no good reason for you to read the rest of this review: just don't buy Red Rag to a Bull.

The book, first published in 1983, is organised as a series of little articles, from about half a page to a few pages long, on subjects from Astrology to Yeti, arranged alphabetically. This makes it convenient for reading in odd moments. In many cases, the essay is merely a rant expressing Dr Pyke's disagreement with some more or less popular belief, but sometimes he cites evidence. Quite a few of them are simple linguistic quibbles, such as that catgut is not made from cats and that Welsh rabbit is toasted cheese.

When Dr Pyke does give evidence, it is sometimes ill chosen: he supports his contention that cheese is not the optimal bait for mousetraps by describing an experiment in which mice were offered a choice of several foodstuffs not including cheese!

The title essay, Red Rag to a Bull, is a missed opportunity. It points out, of course, that the colour of the bullfighter's cape is irrelevant to the colourblind bull, and it includes a bit of history of bullfighting which, if it is accurate, would not be without interest: however, since Dr Pyke misspells "muleta" as "mulita", I'm not too confident. In a book of popular science, some scientific background would have been more relevant: mammals are generally colourblind, although there is good reason to believe that their Triassic ancestors did have colour vision, and it has been redeveloped in some mammal groups, including, luckily for us, primates.

He really disgraces himself when writing about the effect of the phases of the moon on human behaviour. He concludes by saying, "it seems perverse that people should still cling to the tattered remains of the fallacy that madness, murder, suicide and crime are influenced by how much of the earth's shadow falls on the moon."

By "fallacy", Dr Pyke usually means "delusion". The nearest he comes to fallacy is when he tries to show two invalid mathematical proofs, one that +1=-1 and one that 3+2=0. The first of these he clearly did not understand: he both misstates the argument and fails to say what is wrong with it. For the second, he does say that it fails because of division by zero, but he ends the proof before the step in which division by zero occurs.

So if you do read the book and find that Dr Pyke claims something that you are unfamiliar with, you should look for independent confirmation.