In 1870, the Imperial authorities in London ordered a heraldic designer to come up with a flag and crest for a part of the British Empire called Turks and Caicos. The designer had never heard of...
In London Labour and the London Poor (1861), Henry Mayhew recorded seeing a watercress girl who, eight years old and ‘dressed only in a thin cotton gown and a threadbare shawl wrapped round...
Scientific discovery, as any PhD student halfway through their project will tell you, is hard work: progress is step-wise, and the steps are small. Not surprisingly, however, the popular view of...
In James Bamford’s first book on the National Security Agency, The Puzzle Palace, published soon after Reagan became President, Frank Raven, an NSA official, is asked what happens when...
I n winter there is only one road open to traffic in Yellowstone Park. As it moves east to west through the wide valleys of the Park’s northern range, it crosses the territories of a...
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...
Monday. A pre-recorded announcement, a few words of welcome in Gaelic then the safety stuff in English, hangs in the air behind the departing ferry. Little else is moving but the clouds, and...
In the last issue of the LRB, Steven Shapin mentioned an anti-Darwinian organisation in California called the Institute for Creation Research. ‘Its leading lights call themselves Creation...
In February 1943, Erwin Schrödinger delivered a series of three lectures in Dublin. A year later, they were published as a book, under the title What Is Life?, so ensuring that...
America loves science. It has always loved science. As long ago as the 1830s, Tocqueville remarked on America’s love of science, and present-day surveys establish not only that 85 per cent...
To me, a wood without pigs is like a ballroom without women.
T he trees of London are a slow-rising tide. Walk across the centre of the city, from Temple Station on the Embankment to King’s Cross on the Euston Road, and you have them with you all the...
A sked whether any single word would serve as a prescription for all one’s life, Confucius proposed ‘Reciprocity’. Jesus said it in a few more words: ‘Do unto others as...
Solly Zuckerman was one of a group of clear thinkers on both sides of the Atlantic who helped make science a normal part of government policy. He began at floor level in 1940, when the Royal Navy...
At the end of her lively, well-researched and wide-ranging inquiry into the ‘hush’ she believes surrounds the subject of menstruation in America, Karen Houppert thinks about her...
In October 2000, the last wild Spix’s macaw, a solitary male, disappeared from its patch of forest in Brazil. The species is not, technically, extinct: a few dozen individual birds survive...
The birth of almost every science has been achieved with the help of a map. Astronomy began by mapping the stars. Anatomy – and modern medicine – is indebted to those flayed bodies...
Big Louis is dead. I found out only yesterday, because the last time I went to the Clinic I didn’t meet any of the people who might have told me, which can happen when you’re down to...