The Prince of Wales would love The Forgiveness of Nature. The underlying vision is of England on a Saturday afternoon in late summer, the village green bathed in golden light, the groundsman...
‘Objectivity’ is a word at once indispensable and elusive. It can be metaphysical, methodological and moral by turns, occasionally in the same paragraph. Sometimes it refers to the...
The noises of the sperm whale are unlike the lyric hootings and musings of the humpback, whose ‘songs’ won him a place in the LP charts in the 1970s. Recordings of the humpback were...
‘Any form represented by few individuals,’ Darwin wrote in The Origin of Species, ‘will, during fluctuations in the seasons or in the number of its enemies, run a good chance of...
In John Lanchester’s novel Mr Phillips, the hero, a newly redundant accountant, is taken hostage during a bank robbery. Lying face down on the ground, he passes the time rehearsing a...
Eva C., one of the most sensational ‘materialising’ mediums of the early 20th century, was much photographed in the act of producing spirits in the form of ectoplasmic structures, or...
One of the most tangential, and consequently least horrible, contingencies of the Soham murders is the decision by the parents of an 11-year-old girl to have a microchip implanted in their...
Before 1983 the Chelsea Physic Garden was a secret place you glimpsed from the top of a bus passing along the Embankment. Not many got through its gates – one director, at least, took...
After two or three days of illness, pains of extraordinary severity develop. The head feels as though the skull is opening and shutting. Excruciating backache feels like the bones grinding...
Of the many fantasies provoked by the spread of the Internet, few are creepier than the vision of a world in which every relationship can be dissolved at the click of a mouse. Yet the click might...
As I write, the temperature in New York City is 86° F. The relative humidity is 56, the winds are south-westerly at seven mph, visibility stands at six miles. What do those numbers really...
Mars shimmers in the night skies above the south-western deserts like something projected onto a black screen by a collective imagination. It is variously a fabulous technical challenge, an extension of...
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...
We all know how it happens. One day, without warning, you feel oddly removed from things and people, as if an invisible wall of glass were separating you from them. They go about their business...
At school, I was taught by a married couple of maths teachers called Mr and Mrs Deas. Little imagination was called for from Mrs Deas. She taught what the Scottish curriculum of the day called...
Under the gutter of our house are many cobwebs, each attached at a slightly different angle to the wall. It’s an east-facing wall, so on sunny mornings the cobwebs are alight. A whole...
August 1974. Compared to the Cortinas and Maxis in the carpark, the prototype Concorde taxiing onto the runway at RAF Fairford looked astonishingly modern: but then, it always would.
The old notions of space and time are currently being turned upside down by theoretical physicists in their attempt to reconcile the two great pillars of 20th-century physics: quantum theory and...