In astronomy as in medical science, humanity is acutely and, in the second case at least, painfully, aware of its limitations: we can see the ravages of cancer, but are yet largely unable to conquer it; we can see our universe, waiting to be discovered, but as yet lack the means to do so.

Bit by bit, however, we push back the frontiers. In The Violent Universe the author takes the reader on a series of "joyrides through the X-ray cosmos" liberally illustrated with photographs and artificially coloured X-ray images from recent telescopic explorations of the universe.

The images, from sources that include the Hubble Space Telescope and the rather more recent Chandra X-ray Observatory, are given plenty of room in this large-format volume.

Each of the nine chapters is devoted to a different aspect of the universe - galaxy formation and type, supernovae, binary star systems, black holes and so on. There are a few pages of explanatory text, then up to 20 pages of photographs with lengthy and detailed captions.

Many of the better-known artworks of space are here - the Cat's Eye Nebula, the northern Chandra Deep Field image, the Hubble telescope's fantasically detailed image of the Eagle Nebula, and Eta Carina destroying itself.

While leafing through the book on my way to work by public transport, many travellers clearly thought me deranged (or an art critic) for so closely scrutinising apparently meaningless blobs of colour. Others caught on and at least one seemed to share my enthusiasm for a fuzzy red dot in a grainy photograph that lacks apparent form or meaning. It's a shot of quasar SDSS 1030+0524, which is 13 billion light years away, near the believed edge ("finite but unbounded", according to Einstein) of the universe. For the moment, it's the only view we've got.