Journalism

by Andrew Robinson

The above is the introduction to a review in Nature of a British Museum exhibition on the Egyptian Book of the Dead--see below.

Read a wide variety of reviews of books, exhibitions and films, plus features including profiles and obituaries, published in the following UK and US newspapers, magazines and journals during the past two decades:

1. GENERAL INTEREST

​Reviews

2007: "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

2008: "Rocket man", The Financial Times, 5/6 January 2008
Review of Von Braun: Dreamer of Space, Engineer of War by Michael J. Neufeld

2010: "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
 
2011: "High society", History Today, February 2011

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

2011: "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

2014: "The brewer's tale", Current World Archaeology, 68, 2014
Review of The Brewer's Tale: A History of the World According to Beer by William Bostwick

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

2015: "The ascent of English", Nature, 12 March 2015
Review 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, 21 November 2015

Review of the film, Steve Jobs

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

2016: "Asylums and after", Science, 14 October 2016

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

2016: "Four shakes a second", The Daily Telegraph, 15 October 2016

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

2017: "All around Turing", New Scientist, 7 January 2017

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

2017: "The cradle of humanity", Current World Archaeology, 81, 2017

Review 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, 8 April 2017

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

2017: "Prophet of the space age", The Daily Telegraph, 9 December 2017

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

2018: "Einstein goes east", Science, 18 May 2018

Review 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, 5 July 2018

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

2018: "A physicist's final reflections", Science, 16 November 2018

Review of Brief Answers to the Big Questions by Stephen Hawking

2019: "How Victorian England inspired Vincent van Gogh and his art", The Lancet, 27 April 2019

Review of the film, At Eternity's Gate, and the Tate Britain exhibition, Van Gogh and Britain

Features

1998: "'I've been in revolt all my life'", The Times, 4 February 1998
Profile of Henri Cartier-Bresson

1998: "Cutting edge of cinema", The Guardian, 7 September 1998
Obituary of Akira Kurosawa
 
2000: "Mayan treasures deep in the jungle", The Times, 19 August 2000
Travel feature about Mayan art in Mexico

2002: "'I had no idea that madness in the Islamic world had gone so far'", The Times, 7 August 2002

Profile of V. S. Naipaul on his 70th birthday

2004: "Henri Cartier-Bresson", The Guardian, 5 August 2004
Obituary of Henri Cartier-Bresson

2005: "Ray of light still shines in the dark", The Times, 18 August 2005
Feature about Satyajit Ray on the 50th anniversary of his first film, Pather Panchali

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

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

2016: "London shaken and stirred", BBC History Magazine, April 2016
Feature about the London earthquakes of 1750

2016: "Forgotten Utopia", New Scientist, 17 September 2016
Cover feature about the ancient Indus civilisation and its lack of warfare

2017: "He wrote the future", Nature, 19 January 2017
Feature about Arthur C. Clarke on his birth centenary

2018: "Thus spake Albert", Aeon, 12 March 2018
Feature about why we love to quote--and misquote--Albert Einstein

2018: "Tom Lehrer at 90", Nature, 5 April 2018
Feature about mathematician and satirist Tom Lehrer

2019: "The experiment that made Einstein famous", The Wall Street Journal, 14 February 2019
Feature about the solar eclipse of 1919 and its confirmation of general relativity

2. SCIENCE AND THE HISTORY OF SCIENCE

2005: "A polymath's dilemma", Nature, 17 November 2005

Feature about Thomas Young, and polymathy in science

2014: "How do we know the structure of the periodic table?", (BBC) Focus, March 2014
Feature about the history of the periodic table of the chemical elements

2014: "Good scientists and honest people", Physics World, June 2014
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, 31 March 2016
Review of the film, The Man Who Knew Infinity
 

2016: "The Marconi connection", New Scientist, 13 August 2016
Review of Marconi: The Man Who Networked the World by Marc Raboy

2016: "Use a toad to catch a quake", New Scientist, 3 December 2016

Feature about Zhang Heng, inventor of the world's first seismoscope

2017: "The mathematics of life, death, and beauty", The Lancet, 18 February 2017

Review of the Mathematics gallery at the Science Museum and its catalogue by David Rooney

 ​

2017: "Scientist, theologian, and heretic", The Lancet, 7 October 2017

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

2019: "The eclipse that made Einstein famous", Science, 10 May 2019

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

2019: "Modern math meets fairy-tale physics", Science, 31 May 2019

Review of The Universe Speaks in Numbers: How Modern Maths Reveals Nature's Deepest Secrets by Graham Farmelo

3. ARCHAEOLOGY AND SCRIPTS

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

Feature about Michael Ventris

2006: "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

2009: "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

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

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

2019: "Unicorns from Utopia", British Museum Magazine, Autumn 2019

Feature about the Indus civilisation