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In Conversation: Seven Centuries of Climate Change in Print
On 7th June 2022, we held a unique panel event with rare book experts and special guests at our Mayfair bookshop, exploring the history of climate change and environmentalism. Inspired by One...
The Searchers: London’s Great Plague and the Bills of Mortality
By Andrew Stewart MacKay Comprised of information collected by knowledgeable local women known as Searchers, and printed by a respected City businesswoman named Ellen Cotes, the 1665 Bills of...
Alan Turing – Decoding a Life
By Tomas Elliott Perhaps the reason why the life and legacy of Alan Turing (1912–1954) continue to fascinate is because they intersect with some of the great highs and lows of twentieth-century...
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz – the best of all possible computers
To mark the launch of our new Philosophy digital catalogue, Tomas Elliott looks into the early history of computing through the work of philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. In 1948, the American...
The End of the World: Eugène Huzar’s Technological Catastrophism
In recent years, the urgency of warnings about environmental crisis have escalated. News reports and governments have a tendency to treat ecological concerns as a 21st century preoccupation that,...
Science fact and science fiction: Part II
The first part of this blog series can be found here. Ray Bradbury has said the importance of science fiction lies in that fact that it is “the history of ideas, the history of our civilization...
Science fact and science fiction: Part I
In a recent interview, Margaret Atwood speculated that the world we currently live in is not a million light years away from the dystopias such as those we might find in her fiction. Her MaddAddam...
Mad, bad and dangerous to read: banned books
In The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890), Lord Henry refutes Dorian’s claim that the infamous ‘yellow book’ he read in his youth was responsible for the onset of his moral dissolution, on the grounds...
Euclid and His Translators
Euclid of Alexandria is considered the ‘Father of Geometry’. The foundation of our understanding of geometry, algebra, and number theory, Euclid’s Elements has been translated and re-interpreted...
The Scientific Renaissance
Two coincident events have been credited with sparking the scientific Renaissance. The Fall of Constantinople in 1453 accelerated the rediscovery of ancient scientific texts, while the invention of...
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