Search Results

“... such witty vexations form little part of the resolutely Anglocentric ‘true story’ recounted by Dava Sobel. Rather, her hero, the ‘lone genius’ of her ostentatious subtitle, is John Harrison, a dour Yorkshire carpenter and village choirmaster who spent half a century from the early 1720s trying to make clocks capable of determining longitude and to ...”

“... of inheritances, dramatic shifts in social class and the occasional total eclipse of the Sun. Dava Sobel’s The Glass Universe: The Hidden History of the Women Who Took the Measure of the Stars begins in the late 19th century, following the story of the women (and a few men, too) who worked at the Harvard College Observatory computing the location ...”

“... Taking the Cure, a history of spa-going? Or Amazing Grace, a cool look at dukes? Before there was Dava Sobel, or Nick Hornby, or Fermat’s Last Theorem or Andy McNab, there was Mr Turner, and his series of second-hand typewriters. ‘I remember a van arriving out of the blue with a fine stock of near-prehistoric machines,’ he says. ‘My father very ...”

“... the taste of his young officers. The method will be familiar, at least in principle, to readers of Dava Sobel’s Longitude, in which John Harrison the clockmaker is the hero of the urgent but endlessly protracted quest for a method of accurately determining longitude (essential to expanding maritime power). Sobel casts ...”