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Books

The weather: a very British obsession

Brave Victorian eccentrics risked their lives and fortunes pioneering a reliable storm-warning system, as Peter Moore reveals in his gripping The Weather Experiment

4 July 2015

9:00 AM

4 July 2015

9:00 AM

The Weather Experiment: The Pioneers who Sought to See the Future Peter Moore

Chatto, pp.396, £20, ISBN: 9780701187996

As I got into a Brighton taxi this morning, my driver’s first words were ‘apparently it’ll clear in a couple of hours’. I gathered — of course — that he was talking about the morning mist. ‘It’s almost gone already up in town.’ A conversation about weather prospects is hardly uncommon in British taxis, and we launched into this one with no preamble at all (he hadn’t said hello), as though invisibly picking up the thread of a conversation already in progress, a perpetual, life-long discussion about whether it’ll rain tomorrow filling in as the default whenever nothing else is...

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