Journalism

by Andrew Robinson

:tem

Above is the introduction to my review of a British Museum exhibition on the Egyptian Book of the Dead in 2010--see link immediately below.

Read a wide variety of general-interest reviews of books, exhibitions and films, followed by features, including profiles and obituaries, written for British and American newspapers and magazines:

​REVIEWS

2007: "Einstein on and off the soapbox", New Scientist
--of Einstein on Politics by David Rowe and Robert Schulmann + Einstein: A Biography by Walter Isaacson

2008: "Rocket man", The Financial Times
--of Von Braun: Dreamer of Space, Engineer of War by Michael J. Neufeld

2010: "How to behave beyond the grave", Nature
--of the British Museum exhibition, Journey Through the Afterlife: Ancient Egyptian Book of the Dead
 
2011: "High society", History Today

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

2011: "The captain and the castaway", The Independent
--of Crusoe: Daniel Defoe, Robert Knox and the Creation of Myth by Katherine Frank

2014: "The brewer's tale", Current World Archaeology
--of The Brewer's Tale: A History of the World According to Beer by William Bostwick

2015: "Ringing changes on vital information", Physics World
--of Information Age: Six Networks That Changed the World, edited by Tilly Blyth

2015: "The ascent of English", Nature
--of Scientific Babel: The Language of Science from the Fall of Latin to the Rise of English by Michael Gordin
--listen to a Nature podcast about the review

2015: "Reality change and check", The Lancet

--of the film, Steve Jobs

2016: "Artist and empire", History Today
--of the Tate Britain exhibition, Artist and Empire: Facing Britain's Imperial Past

2016: "Asylums and after", Science

--of the Wellcome Collection exhibition, Bedlam: The Asylum and Beyond

2016: "Four shakes a second", The Daily Telegraph

--of Furry Logic: The Physics of Animal Life by Matin Durrani and Liz Kalaugher

2017: "All around Turing", New Scientist

--of The Turing Guide by Jack Copeland, Jonathan Bowen, Mark Sprevak and Robin Wilson

2017: "The cradle of humanity", Current World Archaeology

--of The Cradle of Humanity: How the Changing Landscape of Africa Made Us So Smart by Mark Maslin

2017: "Hipposandals, plague pits and chamberpots", The Lancet

--of the Museum of London exhibition, Tunnel: The Archaeology of Crossrail

2017: "Prophet of the space age", The Daily Telegraph

--of Arthur C. Clarke: Odyssey of a Visionary by Neil McAleer

2018: "Einstein goes east", Science

--of The Travel Diaries of Albert Einstein: The Far East, Palestine, and Spain, 1922-1923, edited by Ze'ev Rosenkranz

2018: "Revisiting the culture wars", Nature

--of A Future in Ruins: Unesco, World Heritage, and the Dream of Peace, by Lynn Meskell

2018: "A physicist's final reflections", Science

--of Brief Answers to the Big Questions by Stephen Hawking

2019: "How Victorian England inspired Vincent van Gogh and his art", The Lancet

--of the film about Van Gogh, At Eternity's Gate + the Tate Britain exhibition, Van Gogh and Britain

​2019: "More than a merchant's trading route", Science

--of Silk Roads: Peoples, Cultures, Landscapes, edited by Susan Whitfield

2020: "Apocalyptic archaeology", Nature

--of Digging Up Armageddon: The Search for the Lost City of Solomon by Eric Cline

2020: "Indian sun", Sight and Sound

--of Indian Sun: The Life and Music of Ravi Shankar by Oliver Craske

​2020: "Net entanglement", Physics World

--of The System: Who Owns the Internet, and How It Owns Us by James Ball

2020: "How did ancient cities weather crises?" Nature

--of The Life and Death of Ancient Cities: A Natural History by Greg Woolf

FEATURES

1998: "'I've been in revolt all my life'", The Times

--profile of Henri Cartier-Bresson on his 90th birthday

1998: "Cutting edge of cinema", The Guardian
--obituary of Akira Kurosawa
 
2000: "Mayan treasures deep in the jungle", The Times
--on visiting Mayan art in Mexico

2002: "'I had no idea that madness in the Islamic world had gone so far'", The Times

--profile of V. S. Naipaul on his 70th birthday

2004: "Henri Cartier-Bresson", The Guardian
--obituary of Henri Cartier-Bresson

2005: "Ray of light still shines in the dark", The Times
--on the 50th anniversary of Satyajit Ray's first film, Pather Panchali

2014: "How do we know how to measure longitude?", (BBC) Focus
--on the history of measuring longitude in the 300th anniversary of the Longitude Prize

2015: "Restored Apu Trilogy returns Satyajit Ray's humane work to theaters", The New York Times,
--on the US re-release of a restored version of Satyajit Ray's The Apu Trilogy

2016: "London shaken and stirred", BBC History Magazine
--on the London earthquakes of 1750

2016: "Forgotten Utopia", New Scientist 
--on the ancient Indus civilisation and its puzzling absence of warfare (cover story)

2017: "He wrote the future", Nature
--profile of Arthur C. Clarke on his birth centenary

2018: "Thus spake Albert", Aeon
--on why we love to quote, and misquote, Albert Einstein

2018: "Tom Lehrer at 90", Nature
--profile of Tom Lehrer on his 90th birthday

2019: "The experiment that made Einstein famous", The Wall Street Journal
--on the centenary of the 1919 solar eclipse and its confirmation of general relativity

2019: "How Britain saved Einstein", BBC History Magazine

--on Albert Einstein's escape to Britain from Nazi death threats in 1933

2020: "The origins of writing", British Museum Magazine ​[to be published in August]

--on whether writing had a single origin in ancient Mesopotamia/Egypt or many origins around the world

​The following reviews and features are of more specialised interest, covering Science and the History of Science, Archaeology and Scripts, and Indian History and Culture:

SCIENCE AND THE HISTORY OF SCIENCE

2005: "A polymath's dilemma", Nature

--feature on Thomas Young, and polymathy in science

2014: "How do we know the structure of the periodic table?", (BBC) Focus
--feature on the history of the periodic table of the chemical elements

2014: "Good scientists and honest people", Physics World
--review of Nuclear Dawn: F. E. Simon and the Race for Atomic Weapons in World War II by Kenneth D. McRae
​

2016: "In search of Ramanujan", Nature
--review of the film about Srinivasa Ramanujan, The Man Who Knew Infinity
 

2016: "The Marconi connection", New Scientist
--review of Marconi: The Man Who Networked the World by Marc Raboy

2016: "Use a toad to catch a quake", New Scientist

--feature on Zhang Heng, inventor of the world's first seismoscope

2017: "The mathematics of life, death, and beauty", The Lancet

--review of the Mathematics Gallery at the Science Museum and its catalogue by David Rooney

 ​

2017: "Scientist, theologian, and heretic", The Lancet

--review of Priest of Nature: The Religious Worlds of Isaac Newton by Rob Iliffe

2019: "The eclipse that made Einstein famous", Science

--review of Einstein's War: How Relativity Triumphed amid the Vicious Nationalism of World War I by Matthew Stanley + No Shadow of a Doubt: The 1919 Eclipse that Confirmed Einstein's Theory of Relativity by Daniel Kennefick

2019: "The tempestuous genius of Fritz Zwicky", Physics World

--review of Zwicky: The Outcast Genius Who Unmasked the Universe by John Johnson Jr

​2020: "Books in Brief" (1), and "Books in Brief" (2), Nature

--short reviews of ten books from many scientific disciplines

ARCHAEOLOGY AND SCRIPTS

2002: "Cracking the Linear B code", BBC History Magazine

--feature on the 50th anniversary of Michael Ventris's decipherment of Linear B

2006: "Visible marks of the move from sound to stone", The Times Higher Education Supplement 
--review of The First Writing: Script Invention as History and Process edited by Stephen Houston + Ideogram by J. Marshall Unger

2009: "Decoding antiquity: eight scripts that still can’t be read", New Scientist
--feature based on Lost Languages: The Enigma of the World’s Undeciphered Scripts (cover story)

2017: "Little more than tea and cricket", History Today

--review of Inglorious Empire: What the British Did to India by Shashi Tharoor

2019: "Unicorns from Utopia", British Museum Magazine

--feature on the Indus civilisation

2020: "Buddhism illuminated", The Lancet

--review of the British Library exhibition, Buddhism