A hard-hitting and honest memoir from Michael Fuller, Britain's first black Chief Constable, who reflects on his astonishing life growing up in care and his extraordinary experience of the race and cultural barriers in his career.

We live in a material world. But what is matter? Can it point us towards meanings outside itself, or can any meaning it possesses only be invested in it by human beings? To what extent might these semantic activities overlap? How have our current understandings of matter and meaning developed from those of past thinkers, in both Western and non-Western contexts?

These and many other questions were addressed at a conference held under the auspices of the Science and Religion Forum at Liverpool Hope University in 2008. That conference brought together some leading figures in the...