In 1794 Robert Watt, an Edinburgh wine merchant, together with a few associates, was arrested for allegedly framing a plot to seize the Edinburgh post office, the banks and the castle, and to...
Eight years, billions of dollars and thousands of dead bodies into the ‘global war on terror’ – sorry, Mr President, the ‘overseas contingency operation’ – and...
What I did on my holidays. Twice in the summer I went to France, to La Sauvetat in the South-West and Mourjou in the Auvergne, and once in the spring to Italy, to Santa Cristina in Umbria, not...
I don’t know what it’s like at your end of the global village but I keep coming across extraordinary instances of evolutionary good cheer. The optimism doesn’t involve the...
Insects were recruited into the debate about the reality of evolution through natural selection, a tradition that still continues with the universal use of the fruit fly Drosophila as the model organism...
Our first glimpse of life in the highlands of the Andes was at the end of our last dirt road before ten days of walking. We were descending on Cachora in a van and encountered a girl-woman of 14...
A surprising number of mathematicians, even quite prominent ones, believe in a realm of perfect mathematical entities hovering over the empirical world – a sort of Platonic heaven. Alain...
In early March, while staying at our holiday cottage in Trafalgar on the KwaZulu-Natal south coast, I went swimming, as has been my habit for many years, in the idyllic Mpenjati lagoon. The...
‘Codex’ is a fancy word for ‘book’, but useful because it distinguishes the physical form from the text it contains. Thus a codex, a set of bound pages, is distinct from a...
When Queen Anne died in August 1714, the news was received with excitement in the medieval town of Hanover in Lower Saxony. Under the terms of the Act of Settlement of 1701, Anne’s death...
This was the day General Motors came to the end of the road. I once asked a Sudanese politician to name the thing that in his eyes proved a nation was a nation. He didn’t hesitate:...
The best one-volume encyclopedia in the world used to be the Columbia Encyclopedia, first published by Columbia University Press in 1935. In our house we have the fifth edition, from 1993, and we...
The ubiquitous @, which had seemed so analytically secure, turns out to be engorged with potential meanings. That, presumably, is what people hope for when they sign up for Twitter: that they can be anyone,...
Was there a time when people didn’t know what other people were thinking? I can vouch for the fact that there was: it lasted, roughly speaking, from the dawn of man until the launch of...
It’s curious in so many ways, watching the consumer bubble as it shrivels. People don’t stop wanting to buy stuff just because they are frightened. There are so many ways that fear...
Stendhal said that the novel was ‘a mirror that one walks down a road’, ‘un miroir qu’on promène le long d’un chemin’. Although this maxim is generally...
Physics became ‘modern’ at breakneck speed. Only 20 years separated Einstein’s formulation of special relativity, in 1905, and the development of quantum mechanics in 1925-26....
The practices of science, it appears, are increasingly industrial in location, corporate in organisation, and product and profit-minded in motivation. In the eyes of various commentators, these...