Sancho Panza fancied himself a wine connoisseur of rare ability. Challenged on his claim to have a ‘great natural instinct in judging wines’, he assured a sceptic that you ‘have...
A wheel unit from one of the older, smaller Airbus brothers of the A380 which has just been unveiled in Toulouse is on display in the foyer of the Science Museum. It is very large and very good...
In principle, DNA analysis has made it possible to establish to a very high degree of probability the human source of even a minute quantity of biological matter – most notably blood, semen...
The polar bears stare forlornly at Hudson Bay. It’s late November and they should be out on the sea ice hunting ring seals, but the ice hasn’t formed and the bears are starving. Ursus...
On 24 August 1848 an advertisement in the Brooklyn Eagle triumphantly announced a performance by ‘the most extraordinary and interesting man in miniature in the known world’. Charles...
Joanna Blythman does not like supermarkets. The bigger they are, the greater her hatred. She says they are responsible for the slow death of community life. They take the skill out of shopping....
Not long after the First World War, the movie baron Samuel Goldwyn set up a stable of Eminent Authors in an attempt to give silent screenplays more literary weight. One of the recruits was the...
The Long Island Expressway is the clogged main artery from New York to the Hamptons. When my family went on holiday in Britain in the 1970s, taking to the M1 in our M-reg Mini, car-spotting was...
We live in an age, or if not an age a country, where seemingly novel disorders of the mind or body are given names that leave you in no doubt as to their novelty. Who would have thought, for...
Early one morning two Februaries ago, I stood in shirtsleeves in the tiny bay of Crinan in the extreme west of Argyll. The sun was brilliant in a rinsed blue sky. On a nearby islet an unmoving...
One of the many endearing peculiarities of academic life at Harvard is that even routine departmental meetings sometimes turn out to be catered. Email announcements specify not just time, place...
Graham Robb, who is well known for his biographies of Balzac, Victor Hugo and Rimbaud, has written a history of what he calls a ‘vanished civilisation’, his theme being that in the...
In May 2000 the Clay Mathematics Institute announced that it was offering seven prizes, worth $1 million each, for the solutions to seven mathematical problems, which had been identified by a...
Londoners have been drinking the New River for almost four hundred years. The aqueduct begins at Chadwell Spring, near Ware in Hertfordshire, and is soon joined by a cut from the River Lea. It...
Two years ago I wrote a book about the Riemann Hypothesis (for an account of the hypothesis see A.W. Moore’s article in this issue). The proof of it is something that every...
On page 38 of this book appears one of the most remarkable photographs I have seen. It shows a young mother playing an energetic game (tag, perhaps, or pig-in-the-middle) with her three children,...
There is a tradition of underestimating the nastiness of measles. It has never had the bad publicity it deserves, or been represented in the canon of ‘plague literature’: it has never...
Can you imagine a winter so cold that the sea is frozen over all the way from Norway to Denmark? Not even the last Ice Age saw such a thing, for then the sea level was lower, and all of...