by Lucille Turner | Mar 22, 2020 | History and Fiction
One day, in a nineteenth century idle moment, Leo Tolstoy announced that boredom was the desire for desires. In other words, a person was only bored if he had no desires or because he was unable to identify any at a given time. This ‘I don’t know what I want’...
by Lucille Turner | Feb 29, 2020 | History and Fiction
Hygiene and its Horrors Believe it or not, hygiene was, to some extent, actually invented by a man called Thomas Crapper. At first sight, he does not seem a particularly likely candidate, but a simple name can often be fortuitous. Crapper was born into a time when...
by Lucille Turner | Jan 9, 2020 | History and Fiction
One day, in 1514, a modest Polish physician and scholar named Nicolaus Copernicus dared to suggest that everyone had the wrong idea about how the universe was arranged. Most people still believed the Earth was flat and stationary, so to convince people that in fact it...
by Lucille Turner | Dec 12, 2019 | History and Fiction
What is Money? The answer to the question what is money seems an obvious one. Most people think of money as a medium of exchange; they assume that in the early days of human evolution it took the place of barter. But the truth is, it didn’t. Money never took the place...
by Lucille Turner | Dec 12, 2019 | History and Fiction
What is Money? The answer to the question what is money seems an obvious one. Most people think of money as a medium of exchange; they assume that in the early days of human evolution it took the place of barter. But the truth is, it didn’t. Money never took the place...
by Lucille Turner | Oct 17, 2019 | History and Fiction
BANKING BY STICK It is hard to believe that for hundreds of years the national method of accounting carried out by the London Treasurer consisted of taking a length of wood and cracking it in two. At first sight, wood cracking hardly seems a proper way to run a...
