Ian Glynn, emeritus professor of physiology at Cambridge and a fellow of Trinity College, is the author of An Anatomy of Thought: The Origin and Machinery of the Mind.
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 interested in Kipling’s trees, or in the beautiful flat-topped acacias of the Kenyan rift valley, which are called ‘fever trees’ because they grow in malarial districts. What he writes...
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 ‘begat sons and daughters’. We don’t know whether those first 187 years included a protracted adolescence, or how he fared towards the end of his life. Ira Gershwin’s splendidly...
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