Jerry Brotton
What Killed the Cat?
Curiosity: How Science Became Interested in Everything
By Philip Ball
The Bodley Head 480pp £25 order from our bookshop
The history of curiosity is, as Philip Ball points out in this wonderful and highly entertaining study of its role in scientific enquiry, curious. Aristotle dismissed curiosity as an aimless tendency to pry into things that did not concern us. After all, it was Pandora’s curiosity that unleashed the evils of mankind by opening the jar given to her by Zeus. Early Christianity was even more intemperate, condemning curiosity as a mortal sin. ‘We want no curious disputation after possessing Christ,’ insisted Tertullian; while the King James Bible thundered, ‘Be not curious in unnecessary matters’ (Ecclesiastes 3:23). So how did the word from the Latin cura, meaning ‘care’, come to define virtually all Western scientific endeavour, from Bacon’s scientific method to the Large Hadron Collider’s stated mission to continue ‘a tradition of human curiosity that’s as old as mankind itself’?
For Ball, the answer lies in the celebrated but hotly contested origins of the so-called ‘Scientific Revolution’, the period from the early seventeenth century when Bacon, Galileo, Boyle, Hooke and Newton broke free of the classical tradition
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'There are at least two dozen members of the House of Commons today whose names I cannot read without laughing because I know what poseurs and place-seekers they are.'
From the archive, Christopher Hitchens on the Oxford Union.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/mother-of-unions
Chuffed to be on the Curiosity Pill 2020 round-up for my @Lit_Review piece on swimming, which I cannot wait to get back to after 10+ months away https://literaryreview.co.uk/different-strokes https://twitter.com/RNGCrit/status/1351922254687383553
'The authors do not shrink from spelling out the scale of the killings when the Rhodesians made long-distance raids on guerrilla camps in Mozambique and Zambia.'
Xan Smiley on how Rhodesia became Zimbabwe.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/what-the-secret-agent-saw