A modern day Luddite may be less violent than his historical predecessors, but no less prickly about machines.

Brow-beaten, poor fellow, he is forced into submission by a society hell-bent on automated everything, from tin-openers to toothbrushes and from cameras to credit charges.

Could the key to this dependent existence be basic practical scientific knowledge? With the assistance of the mighty Bloomsbury Dictionary of Science for Everyone, even your mum can read beyond anti-histamine and into the mysteries of the eclipse and the enzyme.

Dictionaries aren’t often as down to earth or endearing as this one; ‘In science, a rose is a rose is a rose. And a quark is a quark is a quark – anywhere, anytime, under any political system’.

Every available