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Negative reviews are fun to write and fun to read, but the world doesn’t need them, since the average work of literary fiction is, in Laura Miller’s words, “invisible to the average reader.” It appears and vanishes from the scene largely unnoticed and unremarked. “Even the novelists you may think of as ‘hyped’ are in…
Thou art speeding round the sun Brightest world of many a one; Green and azure sphere which shinest With a light which is divinest Among all the lamps of Heaven To whom light and life is given; I, thy crystal paramour Borne beside thee by a power Like the polar Paradise, Magnet-like of lovers’ eyes; I, a most…
‘The ancient teachers of this science,’ said he, ‘promised impossibilities and performed nothing. The modern masters promise very little; they know that metals cannot be transmuted, and that the elixir of life is a chimera. But these philosophers, whose hands seem only to dabble in dirt, and their eyes to pore over…
Sometime in the summer of 1786 the fifty-year-old John Adams, graduate of Harvard University, man of science and future second President of the United States, turned up one morning uninvited at The Grove. He was shown round all Herschel’s new telescopes, and they embarked on an impassioned discussion of the…
DECLARATION OF RIGHTS. G OVERNMENT has no rights; it is a delegation from several individuals for the purpose of securing their own. It is therefore just, only so far as it exists by their consent, useful only so far as it operates to their well-being. 2 IF these individuals think that the form of government which…
g. When Shelley pictured science as a modern Prometheus who would wake the world to a wonderful dream of Godwin, he was alas too simple. But it is as pointless to read what has happened since as a nightmare. Dream or nightmare, we have to live our experience as it is, and we have to live it awake. We live in a world…