In the introduction to Almost like a Whale, Steve Jones calls The Origin of Species ‘without doubt, the book of the millennium’. Jones is an evolutionary biologist, so this judgment...
Hildegard of Bingen, 12th-century prophet extraordinaire, would not have been alarmed by the outbreak of Y2K fever, but she would have known how to seize the moment. Eight hundred years ago,...
Most people nowadays who claim to lack a ‘mathematical brain’ can easily sit down to multiply 231 by 34 or divide 2119 by 138 and come up with the answers. Yet in the 15th century...
On 23 May 1909, Jacques Deprat left France for Hanoi with his young family to start a career as a geologist in the Service Géologique de l’Indochine. His advancement had been won...
In November 1944 a group of men met in a London pub. In this fifth year of the war, the capital was dingy, dog-eared, clapped-out, frankly grimy. Though Britain had not shaken off its usual...
Aids – or, more specifically, the lawsuits, criminal prosecutions and political recriminations that followed the transfusion of whole blood or blood products wittingly or unwittingly...
You may have missed out on love, transcendental oneness with the Universe, the adrenaline rush of the warrior, but you’ve had a headache or a bad back. Pain is the one engulfing,...
Why, why, does everyone go on so about the brain? Each Tuesday, the New York Times does its section on science, to which I am addicted. I like best the astrophysical stuff on pulsars and quasars...
There are people who use computers. That, in the context of LRB readers and contributors, is most of us. Above them on the informational equivalent of the Great Chain of Being are the people who...
The language of survival has always been fundamental to feminism. Germaine Greer seems to be convinced that the species is heading for extinction. (Some time ago, in an article in the Observer,...
It is now over a year since my analysis came to an end. I had decided almost at the very beginning that I wanted to write about it and one thing I am still trying to work out is the way this...
No one should take comfort from the title of Roy Porter’s shaggy masterpiece of a history of medicine. ‘The Greatest Benefit to Mankind’ – the phrase is Dr Johnson’s...
Thoughtcrime, as conceived by George Orwell, was one of the black flowers of Thirties totalitarianism. By criminalising thought the dictatorial state planned to erase individuality – even...
The human need for plants extends far beyond simple utilitarian requirements of food, clothing and shelter – there is a yearning for them which is aesthetic, obsessive, sometimes religious....
Jonathan Rée takes some tomfoolery from Shakespeare for his title and uses it to create his own striking metaphor. The middle part of his book is about sign languages for the deaf: voices...
In one of the most celebrated expressions of scientific humility, Isaac Newton said that he felt himself to have been ‘only like a boy playing on the seashore . . . whilst the...
The word ‘meme’, popularised by Richard Dawkins in The Selfish Gene, has recently gained entry into the OED as ‘an element of a culture that may be considered to be passed on by...
Late 20th-century sciences are publicised through hands-on exhibitions, press conferences, chat shows and interactive CD-Roms. The Victorians had a different system and, as usual, painstakingly...