Journalism
by Andrew Robinson
Above left is the introduction to my Nature review of a biopic, The Man Who Knew Infinity, about the uniquely brilliant Indian mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan, published in 2016; above right, the introduction to my British Museum Magazine feature, "The origins of writing", published in 2020.
The following general-interest reviews of books, exhibitions and films, plus features including profiles and obituaries, were published in British and American newspapers and magazines.
REVIEWS
2007: "Einstein on and off the soapbox", New Scientist
--review of Einstein on Politics by David Rowe and Robert Schulmann and Einstein: A Biography by Walter Isaacson
2008: "Rocket man", The Financial Times
--review of Von Braun: Dreamer of Space, Engineer of War by Michael J. Neufeld
2010: "How to behave beyond the grave", Nature
--review of British Museum exhibition, Journey Through the Afterlife: Ancient Egyptian Book of the Dead
2011: "High society", History Today
--review of Wellcome Collection exhibition, High Society: Mind-Altering Drugs in History and Culture
2011: "The captain and the castaway", The Independent
--review of Crusoe: Daniel Defoe, Robert Knox and the Creation of Myth by Katherine Frank
2014: "The brewer's tale", Current World Archaeology
--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
--review of Information Age: Six Networks That Changed the World edited by Tilly Blyth
2015: "The ascent of English", Nature
--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
--review of film, Steve Jobs
2016: "Artist and empire", History Today
--review of Tate Britain exhibition, Artist and Empire: Facing Britain's Imperial Past
2016: "In search of Ramanujan", Nature
--review of film, The Man Who Knew Infinity
2016: "Asylums and after", Science
--review of Wellcome Collection exhibition, Bedlam: The Asylum and Beyond
2016: "Four shakes a second", The Daily Telegraph
--review of Furry Logic: The Physics of Animal Life by Matin Durrani and Liz Kalaugher
2017: "All around Turing", New Scientist
--review of The Turing Guide by Jack Copeland, Jonathan Bowen, Mark Sprevak and Robin Wilson
2017: "The cradle of humanity", Current World Archaeology
--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
--review of Museum of London exhibition, Tunnel: The Archaeology of Crossrail
2017: "Prophet of the space age", The Daily Telegraph
--review of Arthur C. Clarke: Odyssey of a Visionary by Neil McAleer
2018: "Einstein goes east", Science
--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
--review of A Future in Ruins: Unesco, World Heritage, and the Dream of Peace by Lynn Meskell
2018: "A physicist's final reflections", Science
--review of Brief Answers to the Big Questions by Stephen Hawking
2019: "How Victorian England inspired Vincent van Gogh and his art", The Lancet
--review of Tate Britain exhibition, Van Gogh and Britain and film on Van Gogh, At Eternity's Gate
2020: "Apocalyptic archaeology", Nature
--review of Digging Up Armageddon: The Search for the Lost City of Solomon by Eric Cline
2020: "Indian sun", Sight and Sound
--review of Indian Sun: The Life and Music of Ravi Shankar by Oliver Craske
2020: "Net entanglement", Physics World
--review of The System: Who Owns the Internet, and How It Owns Us by James Ball
2020: "How did ancient cities weather crises?", Nature
--review of The Life and Death of Ancient Cities: A Natural History by Greg Woolf
2020: "The ascent of Wikipedia", Science
--review of Wikipedia @ 20 edited by Joseph Reagle and Jackie Koerner
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
--feature 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
--feature on the 50th anniversary of Satyajit Ray's first film, Pather Panchali
2008: "A century of puzzling", Nature
--feature on the centenary of the discovery of the still-undeciphered Phaistos Disc
2010: "Perspiration, inspiration, and the 10-year rule", The Lancet
--feature on the nature of genius
2012: "Ravi Shankar", The Independent
--obituary of Ravi Shankar
2014: "How do we know how to measure longitude?", (BBC) Focus
--feature on the history of measuring longitude in the 300th anniversary of the Longitude Prize
2014: "The nature of light", (BBC) Focus
--feature on the long history of trying to understand light
2015: "Restored Apu Trilogy returns Satyajit Ray's humane work to theaters", The New York Times,
--feature on the US re-release of a restored version of Satyajit Ray's The Apu Trilogy
2015: "Lost and found", History Today
--feature introducing the ancient Indus civilisation (cover story)
2016: "London shaken and stirred", BBC History Magazine
--feature on the London earthquakes of 1750
2016: "Behind the book: Earth-Shattering Events", London Library Magazine
--feature on some influential London Library books about earthquakes, great and small
2016: "Forgotten Utopia", New Scientist
--feature on the ancient Indus civilisation's 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
--feature 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
--feature on the centenary of the 1919 solar eclipse and its confirmation of general relativity
2019: "How Britain saved Einstein", BBC History Magazine
--feature on Albert Einstein's escape to Britain from Nazi death threats in 1933
2020: "The origins of writing", British Museum Magazine
--feature on whether writing had a single geographical origin or many origins around the world
*****
The following, more specialised, reviews and features focus on 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: "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 and 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
2020: "The code-breakers who led the rise of computing", Nature
--review of Behind the Enigma: The Authorised History of GCHQ, Britain's Secret Cyber-Intelligence Agency by John Ferris
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 and 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 British Library exhibition, Buddhism
2020: "Satyajit Ray's bona fide Bengali", Sight and Sound
--obituary of Soumitra Chatterjee
TheCopyright © 2016 Andrew Robinson. All rights reserved.