When I was a boy – on this evidence, a miserable, maudlin sort of child – I used to kill time by calculating the value of a human life. Not the value of your soul or your contribution...
‘I don’t own a computer, have no idea how to work one,’ Woody Allen told an interviewer recently. Most of us have come to find computers indispensable, but he manages to have a...
Aneurin Bevan argued like someone willing to go to the wall for what he was saying. He spoke belligerently. He spoke as though to oppose what he was saying would be to offend against common...
Twenty years ago, the science writer Dennis Overbye published a marvellous book, Lonely Hearts of the Cosmos, in which he traced the development of cosmology – the scientific study of the...
Some years ago Stephen King announced that he would put his new book online before publication, for anyone to read freely. His publishers were spitting dollar signs and the fans delighted. In my...
To anyone attacked by a wild boar the advice from ancient and modern authorities is unanimous: do not run. Baden-Powell, the founder of the Scout Movement, estimated that a horse and rider would...
The Kalashnikov automatic rifle is light, portable and cheap. It scarcely ever jams, even in the most extreme conditions – tropical heat, Arctic cold, bogs, deserts. It can be disassembled...
Bedbugs can hitch-hike long distances and ride about town. But how good they are at very local travel remains undetermined. Urban myths have been around for a long time. ‘Bedbugs are popularly credited...
On the eve of the Liberal Democrat Party Conference in September the armed forces minister, Nick Harvey, a Lib Dem, told MPs that ‘the government had decided in principle to renew...
On a balmy evening in April 2009 Barham Salih, then deputy prime minister of Iraq, sat in the garden of his Baghdad villa while a young internet entrepreneur called Jack Dorsey tried to persuade...
The world is a complex place. That is a truism, but perhaps complexity can be investigated rather than taken for granted. Think of the sorts of causal interaction one might regard as...
Archimedes, the most famous mathematician of classical antiquity, was killed in 212 BC, as a small piece of collateral damage in the Roman sack of the Greek city of Syracuse. Syracuse itself was...
Three or four nights after surgery – when, in the words of the staff, I have ‘mobilised’ – I come out of the bathroom and spot a circus strongman squatting on my bed. He...
David Fincher’s The Social Network, which tells the story of Facebook, is fast and intelligent and mean, a sort of screwball comedy without the laughs. It’s written by Aaron Sorkin,...
Early in the morning on 13 December 2006, police officers from the small town of Hull, Massachusetts, near Boston, arrived at the house of Michael and Carolyn Riley in response to an emergency...
A few years ago, when such a thing still seemed unusual, I found out through Facebook that a friend was pregnant. As soon as I’d fired off a message of congratulation, however, I wondered...
The last few years haven’t been the best for the business of medical research. There was the Sanofi-Aventis researcher in California who was arrested waving a loaded handgun; police found a...
HUAC: Is your brother a member of the Communist Party? Robert Oppenheimer: He is not a member of the Communist Party, to the best of my knowledge. HUAC: Are you speaking as of the present...