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Needful history
A book with a title like The Cambridge History Of Medicine makes an obvious claim to be definitive, but also stakes its territory in the domain of tertiary documentation—we don’t expect its authors to be sharing the bleeding edge of their research, or making controversial claims, but to be providing a digest of the scholarly… Read more
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Complicated fun
In my current mission to read Neal Stephenson’s entire oeuvre, I’ve been zigzagging between his earlier and later publications. If there’s one difference between his early and late work that I can put my finger on easily, it’s the increasing prominence of female characters, and particularly female point-of-view characters. In The Rise And Fall Of… Read more
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More than its parts
Neither One Of Us was the last album Gladys Knight & The Pips recorded for Motown, released after they’d left for Buddha Records in New York. It was a solid commercial success, although the group’s highest chart positions and best-remembered singles would come in the years they spent with Buddha. It’s an absolutely classic slab… Read more
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Still hidden
Hidden Figures tells the long untold story of the black women who worked as mathematicians at NASA in the 1950s and 60s, and who played a vital role in the glory days of the American space programme. These women were subject to a perfect storm of intersectionality, beginning their time at NACA (NASA’s predecessor) in… Read more
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Culturing flavour
The world of ‘elite food’ raises certain questions. It would be easy to write off entirely, from a social justice point of view: good food is domestic food, and everyone should have access to it. Even in a world of perfect economic equality, there would be no way that we could afford to eat Michelin… Read more
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Speculative non-fiction
In the interests of easing myself gradually into research, I’ve continued my investigation of historical bread-baking with quite a modest volume, although not as tiny as the Shire Album with which I started. William Rubel’s Bread: A Global History is not a scholarly work (it lacks references), but some scholarship was clearly involved in its… Read more
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