Selected Journalism
Articles by Andrew Robinson
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Read a variety of recent book reviews and features by Andrew Robinson:

General Interest


1. "Talking therapy fit for a king", The Lancet, 15 January 2011

(Review of the feature film The King's Speech)


2. "Einstein on and off the soapbox"New Scientist, 14 April 2007

(Review of Einstein on Politics by David Rowe and Robert Schulmann and Einstein, a biography by Walter Isaacson)


3.Henri Cartier-BressonThe Guardian, 5 August 2004

(Obituary of Cartier-Bresson)


4. "The Oxford Companion to the Book", Bookdealer, March 2010

(Review of The Oxford Companion to the Book)


5. "The captain and the castaway", The Independent, 17 June 2011
(Review of Crusoe: Daniel Defoe, Robert Knox and the Creation of Myth by Katherine Frank)

6. "Joseph Rotblat's conscientious life in science and politics", The Lancet, 28 January 2012
(Review of Keeper of the Nuclear Conscience: The Life and Work of Joseph Rotblat by Andrew Brown)

Science and the History of Science


7. "How Earth shaped up", Nature, 11 August 2011

(Review of Measure of the Earth: The Enlightenment Expedition That Reshaped Our World by Larrie D. Ferreiro)


8. "The art of medicine: perspiration, inspiration, and the 10-year rule", The Lancet, 30 October 2010

(Essay based on Sudden Genius? The Gradual Path to Creative Breakthroughs by AR)


9. "Shaking the foundations of archaeology", Nature, 10 April 2008

(Review of Apocalypse: Earthquakes, Archaeology and the Wrath of God by Amos Nur and Dawn Burgess)


10. “Rocket man”, The Financial Times, 5/6 January 2008

(Review of Von Braun: Dreamer of Space, Engineer of War by Michael J. Neufeld)


11. "High society", History Today, February 2011

(Review of the Wellcome Collection exhibition, High Society: Mind-Altering Drugs in History and Culture)


12. "Arthur C. Clarke: still looking at the stars", New Scientist, 5 December 2007
(Profile of Clarke on his 90th birthday)



Archaeology and Scripts

 

13. "James Henry Breasted: An American in Egypt", Current World Archaeology, 51, 2012
(Review of American Egyptologist: The Life of James Henry Breasted and the Creation of His Oriental Institute by Jeffrey Abt)

14
. "How to behave beyond the grave", Nature, 2 December 2010

(Review of the British Museum exhibition, Journey Through the Afterlife: Ancient Egyptian Book of the Dead)


15. Decoding antiquity: eight scripts that still can’t be read, New Scientist, 30 May 2009
(Cover feature based on Lost Languages: The Enigma of the World’s Undeciphered Scripts)


16. "Corpus of Indus Seals and Inscriptions"

(Review of volume 3 of the corpus, Antiquity, 2010)


17. "Lots on info, not always accurate", Science, 30 September 2011

(Review of The Information: A History, A Theory, A Flood by James Gleick)


18. "Visible marks of the move from sound to stone", The Times Higher Education Supplement, 24 February 2006

(Review of The First Writing: Script Invention as History and Process edited by Stephen Houston and Ideogram by J. Marshall Unger)



Indian History and Culture


19. "Behind India's technological boom", Nature, 7 April 2011

(Review of Dead Ringers: How Outsourcing is Changing the Way Indians Understand Themselves by Shehzad Nadeem)


20. "A Welsh wizard's Indian genius", The Independent, 28 October 2011
(Review of Orientalist Jones: Sir William Jones, Poet, Lawyer, and Linguist, 1746-1794 by Michael J. Franklin)


21. "Indian Summers", Current World Archaeology, 48, 2011
(Review of The Marshall Albums: Photography and Archaeology edited by Sudeshna Guha)

22. Mysteries in the marble”, The Independent, 22 August 2008

(Review of Taj Mahal by Giles Tillotson)


23.  Ray of light still shines in the dark”, The Times, 18 August  2005

(Feature on Satyajit Ray and the 50th anniversary of the release of his first film Pather Panchali)


24. "The Mathematician and the Mystic", Resurgence, May/June 2011

(Feature on the conversations about reality between Albert Einstein and Rabindranath Tagore, based on a journal article, "Einstein and Tagore", Journal of Consciousness Studies, 1995)