If you’re genuinely happy high status, it’s very hard to have any interaction that will not be well received by the audience, whether it’s one person in an informal meeting or a crowd of fifty thousand at a massive rally. Happy high status reads up close. And it reads at a vast distance. The camera picks it up instantly. It’s a transmission of ener

Comparing the latter chapters of It Was Different to the pages of Holden’s unpublished diary, we can retrace her steps as she lifted out paragraphs and moved around, edited, pruned, and adjusted sentences originally written at the time of the experiences described. Some of the most powerful Blitz scenes in her private diary serve double duty, appea

One other dimension of the gods’ lives is intriguing. Strangely, Asgard also contained temples, cult buildings where the gods themselves made offerings—but to what or whom? The mythology of the Vikings is one of only a tiny handful in all world cultures in which the divinities also practised religion. It suggests something behind and beyond them, o

Saga simply means ‘story’, literally ‘what is said’, both in Old Norse and in the modern Scandinavian languages. As with any storytelling tradition, there are numerous narrative styles and genres, composed at different times and places and for a wide variety of purposes. The first Old Norse sagas were written down in Iceland during the late 1100s,

On paper, therefore, the Victorian logic looks sound: once you have got cooking water at or near 212 °F/100 °C, it shouldn’t really make much of a difference whether the water is vigorously bubbling or only simmering. Yet our eyes and tastebuds tell us that it does. The reason is that properly boiling water moves chaotically and transfers heat to t

That same music would turn into sonic mush in a cathedral.F Western music in the Middle Ages was performed in these stone-walled gothic cathedrals, and in architecturally similar monasteries and cloisters. The reverberation time in those spaces is very long—more than four seconds in most cases—so a note sung a few seconds ago hangs in the air and b

Don’t confuse enthusiasm with priority

In 525BC, Egypt was part of the Persian Empire, after being conquered by Cyrus the Great. On his death, his son, Cambyses, having failed to persuade the powerful priests of Amun to acknowledge his right to the throne of Egypt, assembled a massive army, some fifty thousand strong, and sent them off to the Oracle at Siwa to show them the error of the