invention

Why I won’t patent my brilliant idea

25 July 2020 9:00 am

In the past 30 years, I have driven about 8,000 miles in France in right-hand-drive cars. And I would be…

Saying yes slowly is what’s hampering progress today

11 July 2020 9:00 am

One of my long-held beliefs is that evolutionary biology should be taught extensively in schools. There may be some objections…

Master of disguise: the British genius who concealed whole Allied battle lines

21 March 2020 9:00 am

Early one morning in October 1874 a barge carrying three barrels of benzoline and five tons of gunpowder blew up…

Their Brilliant Careers: The Fantastic Lives of Sixteen Extraordinary Australian Writers, by Ryan O’Neill reviewed

16 June 2018 9:00 am

Almost 120 years ago, the Australian writer Henry Lawson offered some counsel to those who came after him, writing that…

The keys to Chinese

7 October 2017 9:00 am

The history of industry is the story of the reduction of complexity to easily manageable, replicable components or actions. But…

A butterfly-powered parachute gently ridicules the French obsession with flight in the late 18th century, illustrated in Gaston Tissandier’s Histoire des ballons et des aéronautes célèbres: 1783–1800

Steve Jones’s chaotic theory of history

7 May 2016 9:00 am

‘They fuck you up, your mum and dad.’ Philip Larkin’s most famous line has appeared in the Spectator repeatedly, and…

Whoever invented the referendum deserves a kicking

9 April 2016 9:00 am

My favourite quote of the year so far comes from the author Fay Weldon. ‘If this were an all-woman society,’…

The ZX81

When Britannia ruled the digital waves

27 February 2016 9:00 am

Everyone, we hear these days, must learn to code. Being able to program computers is the only way to be…

Perhaps the most formative years in our history were when ‘every second person suddenly died in agony — and no one knew why.’ Above, plague victims are blessed by a priest in the 14th-century ‘Omne Bonum’ by James le Palmer

Why the most important years in history were from 1347 to 1352

1 November 2014 9:00 am

A group of retired Somerset farmers were sitting about in the early 1960s, so Ian Mortimer’s story goes, debating which…