“... sail with the tide, or people gather to witness a total eclipse of the Sun, they are trusting in Isaac Newton’s theory of gravity. For more than three hundred years his theory has proved so accurate in describing the universe that it has enabled us not only to predict tides and eclipses, but even to send spaceships to Jupiter, Saturn and beyond. One ...”

“... Greek, not Egyptian, and in the Christian era, not under the ancient dynasties of the pharaohs, as Isaac Casaubon, the Huguenot Hellenist, had demonstrated with depressing finality much earlier, in 1614. Kircher was oblivious: he never realised that genuine obelisks had stood at royal tombs, or that their inscriptions commemorated rulers. Instead, he read the ...”

“... to write in Latin. Some of the most radical prophets of modernity – Descartes, Grotius and Newton – felt that they could address the deepest questions about nature and nature’s laws, Scripture and tradition, more proficiently in Latin than in their native languages. Into the 18th century, diplomats continued to study Latin, and often used it in ...”

“... for empirical, non-bookish knowledge, which culminated in the findings of Copernicus, Galileo and Newton, all of whom worked outside the official world of learning (the institutions, meanwhile, remained tragically wedded to the old authorities). This Scientific Revolution slowly but surely ushered in an age of rationalism, sweeping away the superstition of ...”

“... wrote graffiti around the streets. ‘We teach all hearts to break,’ it said on the wall of the Isaac Newton School on Lancaster Road. ‘Squat Now While Stocks Last’ on Marsh and Parsons, the estate agent on Kensington Park Road. ‘Nothing was simply one thing,’ Virginia Woolf wrote, but nowhere is ever one place, either. The joy and the trouble ...”