Ian Glynn

Ian Glynn, emeritus professor of physiology at Cambridge and a fellow of Trinity College, is the author of An Anatomy of Thought: The Origin and Machinery of the Mind.

Who’d call dat livin’? ageing

Ian Glynn, 3 January 2002

As a role model, Methuselah is not ideal. Apart from his 969-year lifespan, almost all we know about him is that his first child, a son, was born when he was 187, and that he subsequently ‘begat sons and daughters’. We don’t know whether those first 187 years included a protracted adolescence, or how he fared towards the end of his life. Ira Gershwin’s splendidly...

Mark Honigsbaum is fascinated by fever trees. The phrase may bring to mind ‘the great, grey-green, greasy Limpopo River, all set about with fever trees’. But Honigsbaum is not interested in Kipling’s trees, or in the beautiful flat-topped acacias of the Kenyan rift valley, which are called ‘fever trees’ because they grow in malarial districts. What he writes...

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