‘Four million rivets flying in close formation’: thus RAF folklore on its Shackleton early-warning patrol planes. Aircraft development has been so closely analogous to the...
In the novels of William Gibson and other writers of cyberpunk, the new SF sub-genre, in the glittery non-realism of the movies, cyberspace is crystalline and neonlit and shiny, a place of...
Richard Feynman was one of the élite group of American and British physicists who developed atomic weapons with the Manhattan project in the Second World War. He flashed back into the...
Suffering pain, writer’s block, and the rage of critics, Philip Roth’s hero Zuckerman resolves to quit writing fiction and go to medical school. ‘Who quarrels with an...
Seventy-four years ago a viral pandemic began in America, most likely on a pig farm in Iowa. Fifteen months later it had killed over eighteen million people, 1 per cent of the world’s...
Anti-semitism is so disgusting a disease that timid laypersons might prefer to leave its pathology to the experts, but it is pandemic and they cannot wash their hands of it. Sander Gilman’s...
I had been aware of Miriam Benn for some years, because I kept coming across her trail in libraries: her borrower’s slips between the pages of books, her signature as a user of special...
Not before time, historians are turning their attention to the often remarkably involved careers of the more familiar fruits and vegetables. For long, Redcliffe Salaman held this field alone,...
Imagine that you are a country doctor with an idea for an experiment. Your only difficulty is finding a suitable person to experiment on. This obstacle faces all would-be investigators in this...
Geoffrey Lloyd has held the position of Professor of Ancient Philosophy and Science in the University of Cambridge since 1985. The creation of this personal chair not only honoured a great and...
Is there such a thing as the history of the body, and, if so, how might we study it? The idea of the body as a constant, a given, whose components and attributes must always be there to be known...
In the late Fifties, at university in New Zealand, I did the kind of degree in which you are allowed to mix subjects. I spent my first year reading philosophy, geology and English. I never quite...
It is fatally easy to read into the animal world what we would like to see in our own, to explain the human condition as an inevitable consequence of our biology. Even Charles Darwin was at...
Two men tower above all other 20th-century physicists. One was lucid, quotable, persuasive and peripatetic; the other, complex, obscure, misunderstood, living and working almost entirely in the...
Under the Reagan Administration the United States embarked on a fistful of big science projects, from the space station to the superconducting supercollider and the human genome project. The...
Malaria has accompanied mankind on the slog through six millennia of ‘civilisation’. Hippocrates wrote about it in Ancient Greece; Alexander the Great is usually thought to have died from...
Twenty years after The Limits to Growth comes the sequel. It’s a hard act to follow: the original sold nine million copies and made its authors and backers, the so-called Club of Rome,...
David Benedictus is the Editor of Readings for BBC Radio’s Book at Bedtime. His Sunny Intervals and Showers is ill-suited for late-night reading, since it is not good to have the mind...