another old violin's tale

Some thoughts on

The Violin Maker’s Secret
Evie Woods
Harper Collins 2026

Bookshop.org

Last year I read an old (1914) novel about a fictional Stradivarius violin following the fates of real and fictional players through the centuries of its lifetime. The author of that very romantic romp hiding behind a male pseudonym was Anna von Bonin (1856-1933).

Now I discovered a modern equivalent in the novel by Evie Woods (120 years younger than Anna von Bonin). It is a similarly wild romantic romp, but thankfully this time the violin is not a Stradivarius. It was made by a fictional Irish luthier called William Rathbone who died in 1841. He allegedly learned the craft from Thomas Perry (1738-1818) and knew Niccolo Paganini (1782-1840). Again, we're getting a mix of historic and fictional people through the two centuries of the violin's lifetime (1817-2025). There is a fantasy element in that the soul of the luthier's tragically deceased fiancee appears to have entered the violin, speaks to us as the voice of the instrument, and seems to have a magical influence on the romantic lives of the people who come near it.

Most of the plot is set in the present day (2025), however, with dramatic events unfolding after criminals steal the violin from an auction house but leave it at Heathrow airport where a baggage handler finds it and takes it home. A lot of the novel is also about personal baggage, so the protagonist's job is kind of an early hint to where we're going.

I've read this fairly swiftly and enjoyed it thanks to the subject matter matching my current interest in lutherie. I also happen to agree with the romantic statement being made here that string instruments can change lives (magically or otherwise) - can happen to all of us. I would also consider the author's earlier work The lost bookshop, for similar reasons (is it nominative determinism that she's drawn to objects made from trees?), but might skip the one about a bakery.

megalith mysteries

Some thoughts on

Stonehenge: Making Sense of a Prehistoric Mystery

by Mike Parker Pearson, Joshua Pollard, Colin Richards, Julian Thomas, Kate Welham.

Council for British Archaeology's Archaeology for All 2015

I didn't know much about Stonehenge before reading this and had only seen the monument from the roadside, but seeing that I sometimes get to cover ancient DNA work about various prehistoric populations and communities, I figured I should know something about it, so I picked up this book when I saw it at a charity shop.

I was surprised to learn that the site is a lot more complex and dynamic than I would have thought. It had been a major site even before those famous megaliths were installed, and there are five major phases of its development spanning more than a thousand years (2900-1600 BCE). Intriguing points I noticed include:

• The fundamentally egalitarian nature of pre-agricultural societies, which the authors seem to struggle to understand. They keep wondering about why we don't see the "elite" of stone age groups being marked in any obvious way. I would suggest that's simply because there was no elite, when you were hunting and gathering in a group of a few dozen people, you didn't have the resources to spare to feed a king and his entourage, even though you would still respect the experience of your seniors.
• The scientific challenges of finding out where those stones came from, how they were transported and erected etc.
• How it makes sense that populations that lived in wooden huts if they had any shelter at all spent all this effort to create stone monuments for their deceased. Apparently, an archaeologist visiting from Madagascar made that point clear based on his knowledge of similar megalith culture surviving in Madagascar to this day. The point is that life is transient but the afterlife is forever, so you want ephemeral structures for your lifetime but eternal ones for eternity. Makes sense, in a way. And we still use gravestones, too.
• Archaeologists also found related settlements nearby which may have housed the workers.
• Back in the days of megalith societies, the Orkney Islands were a major centre of excellence for building megalith sites. Part of the reason being that the settlers on those islands had used up all the trees and had to use stones for building by default, so they had more expertise in the use of stones.

PS Here is a recent (June 2026) study of the provenance of one of the megaliths.

time flows slowly in Venice

Some thoughts on

The glassmaker
Tracy Chevalier
The Borough Press 2025

In her novel about the glassmaker families of Murano, which is next door to Venice in the same lagoon, Chevalier uses a slightly unusual technique of slowing down time for the main protagonists of her story. We follow the fates of one family across five generations, but it magically spans more than five centuries (1486 to the present), as time flows more slowly for them. The author uses the allegory of a stone skimming across the lagoon and touching the water several times to visualise the way her characters touch the normal timeline of world events at timepoints separated by decades, sometimes even a century.

As a chemist, I would rather describe the family as an experimental sensor dipped in to probe the times. One could easily rationalise this by prefacing the beginning of each chapter with "What if". What if Orsola Rosso's family had lived during the time when the Black Death first arrived in Venice? What if, only slightly older, they had still been around (minus one or two inevitable deaths) at the time Napoleon conquered the city and handed it over to the Austrians? What if the more mature Orsola Rosso and her grandchildren lived through the Covid-19 pandemic and to the present day?

The advantage of this approach for writer and reader is quite obvious to me - you can have a family history spanning five centuries, without the confusion of going through 15-20 generations of the family involved. It saves time, names, and dead bodies. And in this particular ecosystem, where families really have stayed in the glass making business for centuries, it kind of makes sense. Of course the same people can't be around 500 years later, but their descendants, pursuing the same trade and possibly sharing the same Christian names could be. So it may be less confusing to just use the same cast to dip into the flow of time at various points.

Although, on the other hand it reduces their humanity, as they remain aloof from the times they dip into. I vaguely remember getting a similar feeling in Simone de Beauvoir's novel Tous les hommes sont mortels, where the protagonist is immortal (read 40 years ago). We wouldn't want to do that to real people we're interested in eg from our family history.

Venice and Murano provide a unique test tube for this experiment, with the Venetian cityscape uniquely protected by the lagoon environment which rules out modern development and the Murano glass trade maintaining its traditions in isolation from the world. Thus, while others might feel tempted to apply the dip-in sensor approach to other long-lived trade ecosystems such as wine growing or brewing, I feel it wouldn't work as well without the magical isolation of Venice.

reading classics

I've been reading some classics in Latin the last two weeks, even if it's only classic comics ...

I recently spotted two Asterix albums in the excellent Latin translation of Rubricastellanus (1934-2019) at a charity shop, and took that as a sign to reread the others I have, including one I quickly ordered, now adding up to seven albums (no point in using the numbers as the numbering of the Latin editions is all over the place):

• Falx aurea - I had since my school years, can't remember how I got it.
• Cleopatra -
• Laurea Caesaris - we bought these two for Latin-learning children.
• Papyrus Caesaris - I bought this one when it came out because I loved the original so much and given the topic (the history of Caesar's famous book De bello gallico) I felt I needed the Latin version.
• Gladiator
• Clipeus Arvernus - these two I discovered last month.
• Gallus - this I ordered this month, the only one I found online at a reasonable price.

Well, after reading all seven in a couple of months, I feel I know the translator's style well enough to read anything by him (18 volumes to go, and I also have a comic adaptation of Bellum helveticum for which he prepared the text). It's not Cicero, obviously, so much easier than the proper classics, as he aims for a colloquial tone realistically reflecting how people might have spoken in the street. Classical rhetoric only occurs in quotes from the classics and occasionally to make fun of speakers. Each album comes with a vocabulary prepared by the translator - in some I have each word is translated into five languages (German, English, Spanish, French, Italian), in others it's only German.

Given the obvious issues with the early albums (absence of women, racist stereotypes), I would tend to recommend Papyrus Caesaris for the modern reader (and classics student):

available eg from Abe Books

PS searching for individual titles rather than for the name Rubricastellanus I now ordered a copy of

• Apud Britannos

Completing the translations of the classical series until the death of Goscinny seems like an achievable goal. Only 17 of the 24 have been published in Latin.

PPS: I can partially blame it on all those clergymen and Latin teachers who popped up in my family history, including several called Caesar ...

Update 29.7.2026: Added to the collection:

• Iter gallicum (Tour de France)

an international family history

Some thoughts on

Café Heimat
Louise Jacobs
Ullstein Taschenbuch 2007

This is one of several interesting books the street libraries of Düsseldorf offered me this month, and I read it immediately in my ongoing quest to learn how best to distil family history into book format.

Jacobs is a household name in Germany as a leading brand of coffee. It is the standard middle of the road coffee that your aunties would share at their Kaffeeklatsch since the 1950s and 60s. By the time I started drinking coffee, this brand was so desperately uncool I probably never bought their coffee. Also, I was shopping for fair trade, single origin coffee of course. Note that the whole Fair trade concept is largely motivated by companies like Jacobs who developed clever ways of keeping the money that consumers pay for their coffee in Bremen, rather than paying producers in the developing world a fair share of it.

Thus I didn't read the book for the coffee connection (although I'm sure the brand recognition helped the author to get it published), and I also don't care how much money the Jacobs family earned with the coffee business and how many race horses they bought with it. So let's look at it as just another family history with interesting international connections.

The story telling switches back and forth between two branches of her family tree, namely that of her maternal grandmother Ann Jessurun, whose name line descends from Sephardic Jews in Portugal who came to Hamburg at one point (glimpses of that lineage are on GedBas). During Nazi times her great-grandparents with two young daughter emigrated to Portugal, and onwards to the US. Later her grandmother ended up in Nicaragua, and her grandaunt in Bresil. I'm loving the Latin vibe here.

Her paternal family comes from a farmstead near Bremen, which has been handed down to the oldest son since the 16th century, so nothing too exotic there. The excitement comes from the younger sons who have to go out into the world to find another way of earning a living. Her great-granduncle went to Bremen to set up a shop there (born in 1869, so a little bit older than our shop keeper Julius, born 1883). Her grandfather Walther Jacobs went to America to learn all about capitalism and then came back to Bremen to work with his uncle in the shop, which he then turned into the successful coffee business.

That is obviously more than enough material to fill a book and keep readers interested with the back and forth, culture clashes, success stories and deathly dangers. The author adds an extra layer to it with the discovery story of how she found out about various relatives - not surprisingly as she was still around 20 when she investigated all this and discovered lots of things that clearly weren't discussed openly in the family.

She also dramatises the story with dialogues which may in part come from the memories her older relatives shared with her, but in other parts must have been made up. To me when I write about family history, this would be a bridge too far. While I am happy to speculate about thoughts and motivations, I wouldn't put words in people's mouths when I don't have a record or evidence that they actually said them. In summary, not an example I would follow, but an interesting read nonetheless. I suspect it may have been inspired in part by the Ullstein novel by Sten Nadolny about the Ullstein family who founded the eponymous publishing house where both books appeared.

What's missing from the book? There are obvious asymmetries in the way the Nazi times are treated in the two branches. The tribulations of the Jewish family having to emigrate are covered at great length, but for the coffee family the 1000 years seem to be passing quite quickly. Now that the membership files of the NSDAP are on open access, there may be another journey of discovery to be had here. I note also that two other grandparents are just floating by without revealing much about their lives, namely the wife of Walther Jacobs, Lore Beckmann, and the husband of Ann Jessurun, Fritz Grobien.

Oh, and the music is missing too. The one reason I am interested in the Sephardim is that I happen to love their music, and that isn't even mentioned. There is some singing on special occasions and I recall somebody in the family played cello at one point, and great-grandfather Fritz Jessurun shows off his dance moves late at night in a jazz bar in New York, but for wealthy and cultivated families in the early 20th century, there is less music than I would have expected. Oh, the Jessurun girls got to hear Albert Einstein play his violin - because they were staying with a family friend whose job involved delivering eggs to the great physicist.

facts on friction

I'll admit that I've always tended to avoid friction and the awkward equations that come with it, so I learned a lot from this little book about the issue and why it is important in just about everything, from the wrong kind of leaves on the railway tracks to the mouth feel of your favourite dessert:

Friction - a biography
Jennifer R. Vail
The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press 2026
ISBN 978-0-674-29066-2

My review of the book is now out in the May issue of Chemistry & Industry:

Facts on friction

Chemistry & Industry Volume 90, Issue 5, April 2026, Page 35

access via:

Wiley Online Library (paywalled PDF of the whole review section)

SCI (premium content, ie members only)

A snippet:

I was pleased to find a reference to the ancient meme with the flow chart for all engineering problems, indicating that WD40 is the solution if something doesn’t move but should do, whereas duct tape is recommended in the reverse case. This is still very close to what I need to know about stick and slip, but it is reassuring to remember that there are people out there who know so much more about friction.

(edited to remove a word repetition I only spotted when I saw it printed)

pianos lost and found

Some thoughts on

The lost pianos of siberia
Sophy Roberts
Transworld / Penguin 2020

bookshop.org

Although I have no ambition to visit Siberia or to look for pianos, I am quite envious of the catchy book title, immediately evoking a quixotic quest. The not very convincing excuse for this quest was that the author met a talented young pianist in Mongolia and wanted to find a historic piano that resided within realistic distance so it could be transported to Mongolia.

Apart from being close to Mongolia, Siberia isn’t exactly the place where you would expect to find pianos, so the author has a lot of explaining to do. How and why did pianos get to Siberia, how did they survive there. Along the way we learn a lot about Russian history, how both the Tsarist Empire and Stalin’s USSR deported many thousands of prisoners to Siberia, and some people even went there voluntarily.

Like the previous book I reviewed, The far edges of the known world, this book tells history from the perspective of the periphery, an approach that delivers a refreshingly novel view of the world, even if much of the reality recounted here is as harsh as the Siberian winter. We also get introduced to many more Siberian people of the present than I can remember, so we learn that despite all the horrid history, the vast expanse east of the Ural mountain range is still inhabited to a degree. I seem to remember that even the Denisovans of the Altai cave got a mention, even though I can't find them in the index.

Although not a pianist herself, the author learned enough about the instruments to provide insightful commentary on the various trends and traditions in piano building across the piano mania time in the 19th century when it was almost de rigeur to have such an instrument in your lounge. It was the time when Mr Steinweg went to America and became Steinway, whereas other German makers went east to serve the nascent Russian market.

Personally, if I had to do a quest to find [historic instruments] in [exotic places] I might have chosen something like cellos and Colombia, but as an armchair exploration, pianos in Siberia worked for me too.

PS Speaking of cellos, she didn't mention Lise Cristiani (1827-1853), who took her Stradivarius cello on an epic concert tour through the Russian Empire, covering remote locations that possibly hadn't seen a cello before. That story makes up 1/4 of the more recent book Cello by Kate Kennedy.

a plucky little Lutheran town

Some things I learned from

Trarbach in alter Zeit
by Ernst Schütz
Traben-Trarbach 1909

In my recent investigations about the Ebner ancestors, and separately, the church inspector Johann Conon, I found valuable information in this history of the town of Trarbach, which is available online. As it doesn't have an index and I only discovered the search function belatedly, I read most of it to make sure I didn't miss any further clues to the lives of the people I was after. Although I moaned about the author's harsh treatment of Conon, the rest of the book turned out to be the fascinating story of a plucky little town full of Lutheran people surviving in extremely hard times, including the Thirty-Years' War as well as additional periods of occupation by hostile troups. The time frame is wisely chosen from the arrival of the Reformation in 1557 (which fuelled some of the subsequent wars) to the destruction of the Grevenburg in 1734, whose strategic importance had brought the town more grief than anything else in the previous centuries.

Trarbach - engraving by Bodenehr from 1704.
Source: Wikipedia

Funnily enough, the German Wikipedia entry of the town (now merged with Traben to form Traben-Trarbach) practically skips this part of its history, so I'll outline a chronology here with a special attention to the school where the Ebners taught for 45 years:

 

---

 

Trarbach 1557 - 1734

1557 the Reformation started in the Upper County of Sponheim (German: Hintere Grafschaft Sponheim; see map below) by virtue of a letter from the Duke of Simmern-Palatinate-Sponheim to his Oberamtmann (chief of the administration) at Trarbach, demanding the introduction of protestant practices in the parishes of the county. This happened in accordance with the Augsburg Settlement of 1555 which decreed that the the rulers determine the religion of their subjects (Cuius regio eius religio). However, the Upper County of Sponheim happened to have two rulers of different faiths. Friedrich der Fromme had just inherited the dukedom on the 18th of May 1557. Not wasting any time, on the 16th of July he signed that letter to his administrator in Trarbach. It seems that the other (the Markgraf von Baden) wasn't given much time to protest before the letter went off, but didn't block the introduction of Lutheran practice when it happened.

The five green patches constitute the Upper County of Sponheim - how this splatter survived as a political unit jointly ruled by two different overlords for three centuries is completely beyond me.
Source: Wikipedia / By Lencer - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0

The very Catholic holiday of Fronleichnam was celebrated at Trarbach for the last time in 1557, and Christmas of the same year saw the first Lutheran Abendmahl. In 1560, an official delegation visited all the parishes of the district to see whether the priests in place were able and willing to follow the new rules, and to replace them if they failed the test. The visitation protocols are extremely useful resources giving insights into the lives of people at the time of the Reformation.

In 1571, Heinrich Henning, the first Lutheran vicar of the town, suggested setting up a high school for the district. As it happens, the regional asylum for the paupers had just been moved to nearby Enkirch because unruly residents there might disturb services at the church next door. The building was adapted for use as the school (see photos here and here).

In 1574 The Lateinschule was founded with two classes then expanded to three with a total of 78 pupils: The Infima was an elementary school for boys and girls, the Secunda a highschool for boys only teaching Latin and a bit of Greek, and the Prima prepared pupils for university with more Latin and Greek along with philosophy. The school was financed in part from the income of nearby Wolf monastery and was free of charge for the pupils, although donations were encouraged. Three quarters of the pupils came from the town itself, which then had between 1,000 and 1,200 residents, the others from Traben, Enkirch, or further afield.

Meanwhile, there was trouble brewing at the church next door. In 1572 Johann Conon came to the town as the Diakon (assistant priest). By 1574, he has written a lengthy letter of complaint to the authorities about the Calvinist tendencies of vicar Henning, in joint enterprise with the Diakon of Enkirch who had similar concerns about the vicar there. Both vicars were summoned to court and found lacking in Lutheran purity, and thus dismissed. During the next Visitation, the people of Trarbach, who were fond of Henning, took their revenge on Conon and made multiple accusations against him. He was moved to become the vicar of the more remote town of Dill, but soon after moved on to the court at Birkenfeld where he became court priest and Inspector of the entire Oberamt, officially charged with sniffing out Calvinists everywhere. The widening rift between Lutherans and Calvinists was a big issue at that point. As Lower Sponheim was Calvinist, clergymen of that inclination could find jobs there, while places like Trarbach offered refuge to those evicted for being Lutheran.

From September 1576 and well into 1577 the plague hit the town.

In 1583 the plague returned.

In 1584, the Palatinate share of the rule over Upper County of Sponheim fell to the Duke Charles of Birkenfeld, as he came of age. This is significant for our Lutheran little town, as much of the rest of the Palatinate drifted towards the Calvinist creed and the divisions between both camps were deepening. He still had to contend with the Catholic co-rulers in Baden.

1589 Funding disputes led to the school being scaled down to an ordinary one-class town school, and the Rektor (head of school and teacher of the final class) being dismissed.

By 1591 the authorities agreed to reinstate the school in its old form and reinstall the old Rektor.

In 1597/98 the plague hit the town for the third time.

1618-1648 During the Thirty Years' War, the town changed hands several times. The Swedes finally arriving were seen as liberators as they were protestants like the townspeople.

On 1.1.1649 the Lateinschule relaunched with Nikolaus Klingler as Rektor, Markus Lehmann as Konrektor and Daniel Rima as the schoolmaster for the Infima.

In 1654, Johann Hofmann arrived at the school as the new Rektor. His memoir Trorbachische Ehre-Säul published in 1669 (after retiring in 1667) describes the lives of the people in the town in great detail, including for instance, how the local wine was produced, and what other professions were present. Coming from another wine-growing region (Baden), Hofmann was intrigued by the cultural differences he discovered when he arrived in the Mosel valley. In 1968 a facsimile edition of the book was published ahead of its 300th anniversary. You can read it online here. The glorious title of the book in full: "Trorbachische Ehren-Säul: oder geschichtliche Beschreibung förderst der Fürstl. Spanheymischen Ober-Amts-Statt Trorbach an der Mosel, theils auch anderer Ohrt in derselben Gegend, sonderlich des dahin verbürgerten Haupt-fleckens Traben".

In 1675, Johann Jacob Ebner arrived at the Lateinschule where he taught the younger pupils at first in his dual role as Kantor and Präzeptor. He became Konrektor in 1686.

In 1682, only a century after the Catholic parts of the world, the Upper County of Sponheim switched to the Gregorian calendar.

1683-1697 French occupation under the Reunions policy of Louis XIV. He instructed Vauban to build a massive fortress, Montroyal, on the other side of the river, overlooking Traben. It wasn't completely finished yet when the peace treaty of Rijswijk of 1697 required its destruction.

1685-1703 The tenure of Johann Conrad Arnoldi as Rektor gave the school some much-needed stability in turbulent times. Born at Trarbach, Arnoldi was the son of a previous Rektor and an alumnus of the school himself. He went on to become quite famous as a professor at Giessen and has a detailed Wikipedia entry.

In the war of the Spanish Succession (1701-1714), the French took the Grevenburg again, but were displaced in 1704 by Protestant troups from Hessen, who handed it over to a Dutch unit.

In 1708, Philipp Nikolaus Ebner took over the position of Konrektor at the Lateinschule as his father retired.

The peace treaty of 1714 had an unfortunate side effect for the people of Trarbach, as it gave the Archbishop Elector of Trier the right to station troops at Grevenburg. As the castle was damaged to the degree to make it practically uninhabitable, he forced the town to accommodate his soldiers. Again, the Lutheran town was under Catholic occupation and had to feed its enemies.

This state of affairs lasted beyond the departure of Philipp Nikolaus Ebner to the Hunsrück village of Alterkülz in 1720. I imagine that the situation did make the town a less attractive place to live, so the move to the vicarage of Alterkülz was likely welcome, and the retired Konrektor Johann Jakob Ebner came along too.

In 1734, during the war of the Polish Succession, the Grevenburg was besieged again and practically destroyed. It was never rebuilt and the town had a much happier and more peaceful life without any strategically important fortification in its vicinity.

 

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PS So my ancestors who left the town in 1720 would have had to wait just 14 years longer for the pain to end. Oh well. I am wondering whether to add Trarbach to the lostcities series. Maybe once I've visited it and identified a few more candidates for a third season.

staying alive

In the madness of the UK's Covid response, public health expert Devi Sridhar was a lone voice of reason. Remembering this, I was keen to read her book about the wider application of her thinking to population scale life and death from all causes and found it quite enlightening. Most importantly, she demonstrates how dramatically the political decisions affecting public health differ between countries and how that leads to very different results in avoidable deaths from causes ranging from guns to cars.

How Not to Die (too soon): The Lies We’ve Been Sold and the Policies That Can Save Us
Devi Sridhar
Penguin Viking 2025

My review of the book is now out in the April issue of Chemistry & Industry:

Health accountability

Chemistry & Industry Volume 90, Issue 4, April 2026, Page 34

access via:

Wiley Online Library (paywalled PDF of the whole review section)

SCI (premium content, ie members only)

In the same issue I also have a feature about plant microbiomes. I've covered the field a couple of times in Current Biology (most recently in 2022), but this one is slightly different in emphasis as C&I wanted more about the application side of it than I have previously covered.

Plant probiotics

Chemistry & Industry Volume 90, Issue 4, April 2026, Pages 22-25

access via:

Wiley Online Library (preview of the first page and link to paywalled PDF)

SCI (premium content, ie members only)

life on the edge

Some thoughts on

The Far Edges of the Known World
A New History of the Ancient Past
By Owen Rees
Bloomsbury 2025

Somebody left several copies of the US edition of this new book in an Oxford street library, so I took one home and found it quite interesting. The author looks at the lives of people on the edges of the known empires of antiquity. People lived ordinary lives far away from Rome, Athens, or Thebes, they exchanged goods and services with the neighbouring populations who in the central metropolis would be considered Barbarians, and experienced an interesting mixing of cultures.

We get glimpses of the Scythians on the Pontic Steppe, the Numidians on the Southern borders of Ancient Egypt, Roman soldiers guarding Hadrian's Wall, and the origins of Viet Nam. Far from being the unimportant margins, these edges turn out to be the connecting tissues between different cultures. Unexpected connections occur, eg when considering Southeast Asians simultaneously aware of the Roman and the Chinese empires. Artifacts characteristic of one culture show up in another many thousands of kilometres away. Like other recent books dealing with areas outside the Roman empire including Peter Frankopan's The silk roads and Neal Ascherson's Black Sea, this is also about globalisation happening in Antiquity.

Given the exciting nature of the findings discussed, the author's tone and style is rather subdued. I can't help feeling that somebody like eg Jared Diamond might have written a more engaging book about all of this. However, the surprising connections and discoveries related here are sufficient to make it an interesting read throughout.

Bloomsbury

how trees rule the world

I keep writing about trees, all the wonderful things they do for us, and why we should stop deforestation. I never joined the dots quite like Harriet Rix does in her amazing book

The genius of trees:
How trees mastered the elements and shaped the world
Bodley Head 2025

which shows that our whole environment is basically the product of trees controlling earth, water, air, and fire, the classical elements referenced in the title.

So I should have written this book, but it was more relaxing just reading and enjoying it.

My review of the book is now out in the March issue of Chemistry & Industry:

A world shaped by trees

Chemistry & Industry Volume 90, Issue 3, March 2026, Page 34

access via:

Wiley Online Library (paywalled PDF of the whole review section)

SCI (premium content, ie members only)

As always, I can send a PDF on request.

PS I believe the book is now available as a paperback too - saves some trees!

a world gone mad

Some thoughts on:

A world gone mad
The wartime diaries of Astrid Lindgren
book (2016) and film (2025)

I started reading the English edition of Lindgren's wartime diaries on my recent trip to Dusseldorf, and when I was in the middle of it, I had the opportunity to watch the film in the subtitled version. So here's a combined film and book review.

The English book contains only the translation of the diary entries mainly describing the course of World War II from the perspective of neutral Sweden, which is an interesting angle, especially for those of us, who are like most Europeans used to the perspective from warring factions on one of the other side. Although I haven't been able to locate a copy, I believe the German edition, which has more than twice as many pages, also includes facsimile pages of the original diaries, with clippings and all.

Family life only shines through very sparingly in the English edition, mainly on the occasion of family events such as her daughter's birthday and Christmas, when the presents are listed and menus as well. The family doesn't really come alive from that, so you have to be really interested in the recounting of the war from an unusual angle to make it through this book. Although it is also relatable in the sense that we are now again living in a world gone mad, with surging fascism and wars going on elsewhere, so the feel of watching disaster unfolding from the sidelines does resonate, although there is no real solution on offer.

The film by contrast, puts the family in the centre, with long appearances from several descendants, and lovely visits to the relevant properties, including Lindgren's flat in Stockholm (Wikipedia says it's open for visitors), their summer house, and the house of her parents, which I believe she bought later in life to keep it in the family. Seeing that her daughter Karin was ill for about half the duration of the war, it is good to see her fit and well at age 90.

The film also gives the origins of Pippi Longstocking more time than the diaries did. Apparently, young Karin conjured up the name out of thin air when asking her mother to tell her a story (according to Karin, not in the diaries), and while Astrid Lindgren was herself off work with an injury, she found the time to write it up. Spare a thought for the first publisher who received the manuscript and rejected it. I believe the second one took it on and the rest is history. I read the books multiple times as a child and may have retained an anarchist streak from the exposure

Passages from the war diaries are only used very sparingly in the film, read by an actress playing the writer reading or writing the diaries or engaging in family activities. So, altogether, although the book was useful in keeping track of what is or isn't in the original diaries, I found the film a much more enjoyable and enlightening experience than the book.

Sadly, there doesn't seem to be a UK release in the pipeline.

not understanding quantum mechanics

As a chemist, I have of course used quantum mechanics in various ways and learned the essential textbook equations, but like everybody else on the planet I don't really understand it. I find comfort in the wise words of Richard Feynman that went something like "If you think you understand quantum mechanics, you don't understand quantum mechanics."

After a few decades of not using my non-understanding of quantum mechanics on a regular basis any more, I found the book Why Nobody Understands Quantum Physics by Frank Verstraete and Céline Broeckaert a welcome refreshment of nearly lost memories.

My review of the book is now out in the February issue of Chemistry & Industry:

Quantum understanding

Chemistry & Industry Volume 90, Issue 2, February 2026, Page 34

access via:

Wiley Online Library (paywalled PDF of the whole review section)

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As always, I can send a PDF on request.

To sell books about quantum mechanics, you have to have Schrödinger's cat on the cover. It's the law.

a book for our time

Some thoughts on

Mein Opa, sein Widerstand gegen die Nazis und ich
(My Grandfather, His Resistance Against the Nazis and I)
Nora Hespers
Suhrkamp 2021

Nora Hespers grew up rolling her eyes at her father’s outrageous stories about how his father was an important resistance fighter against the Nazis from the very beginning and how they executed him by hanging him from a butcher’s hook. After her father left the family and disappeared from her life, she never heard the name Theo Hespers mentioned again, as nobody outside the family seemed to be aware of his story. Until the fateful day when a colleague at the broadcaster where she worked casually mentioned that he had written his PhD thesis about her grandad and would she perhaps like to take part in a radio show about him?

This jaw-dropping moment sparked a blog, evolved into a podcast, and eventually crystallised into this very impressive and deeply moving book, which intersperses Theo Hespers’ biography with the journey of discovery undertaken by his granddaughter after she began to realise that the wild stories she heard as a child were largely true, actually. The learning experience that started in autumn 2012 and snowballed through to the completion of the book in 2020 became all the more dramatic as some of the history repeated itself in ways that were unconceivable at the beginning, making it all the more important to pay attention to the lessons of the past.

West Germany honoured the resistance of a very few select people including the White Rose circle around the students Sophie and Hans Scholl, and the July 20 (1944) coup attempt led by Claus Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg. The famous book Das Gewissen steht auf by Annedore Leber, which we had on our shelves when I grew up contains biographies of 64 members of various resistance efforts. (An English version has been published as Conscience in Revolt) In the GDR, the emphasis was naturally on communists fighting the Nazi regime, including the group known (in Nazi documents, not in their own understanding) as the Rote Kapelle (featured in the recent movie From Hilde, with love).

As Nora Hespers notes, the resistance of the July 20 movement only awakened at the time when it was obvious that the war was lost. The officers involved had previously served Hitler’s army without resisting too much. In contrast, her grandfather, motivated by a deep Christian humanism (but also critical of church officialdom) recognised and militated against the sheer inhumanity of nazism from the very beginning. Therefore he and his family had to flee to the Netherlands as early as April 1933 and had to flee further when the Netherlands and Belgium were occupied. At one point, Theo had the opportunity to escape from Dunkirk to England but would have had to leave his family behind, which he refused to do.

This early anti-fascist engagement makes it practically inevitable to compare his story to the modern developments. At the stage where we are now, the likes of Theo Hespers are shouting from the rooftops that we have to stop fascism. Other early resisters around him who also feature in the book include Hans Ebeling (nickname Plato) from Krefeld, Max Behretz (executed 1942), Josef Thome, Josef Steinhage (cofounder of the antifascist paper Der Deutsche Weg, Peter Lütsches, Selma Mayer. Many of Hespers contacts were from various catholic movements, but he didn’t fundamentally object to working with communists united in the cause against fascism.

I read this sort of books partly as examples of how to turn family history into something that is relevant and interesting to humans beyond the family circles in question (which worked out amazingly well for the Hespers family). In this case there was an additional overlap of interest as Theo Hespers’ family lived near Mönchengladbach, in the village of Dahl, which is between Mönchengladbach and Rheydt. (Rheydt was merged into the bigger city in August 1929 and demerged at the specific request of Joseph Goebbels, who hails from there, then merged again in the 1970s.) My grandmother Ruth went to school in Rheydt, and the family lived there from 1923 until they moved to Königsberg in 1935. I didn’t spot any familiar names in the book, and she wasn’t quite the same age as Hespers (she’s from 1908, he from 1903) but I love the idea that with enough info about the social networks around both, one could probably find a connection with fewer than the famous six degrees. I was also intrigued by the very fleeting mention on page 53) that Nora Hespers’ great-grandfather might have ended up owning Kaiser’s Kaffee (a chain of grocery stores originating in Viersen).

Speaking of which, I think a book like this should definitely have an index - if only to save me the trouble of noting down all the names and page numbers. The other thing I missed was: What did that colleague write about Theo in his thesis? I may have missed something but I didn't see it mentioned or cited as a source again.

Nora Hespers launched her blog and podcast as Die Anachronistin, a word merged from the German versions of a (female) chronicler and anachronism, as she describes herself as a chronicler fallen out of the time she's writing about. Unfortunately the times have somehow looped back since then, such that this book about how brave people resisted the Nazis in the 1930s has turned into a very important book for our time, not anachronistic at all.

PS This English-language web page from her publishers seems to be an attempt to sell translation rights, which doesn't appear to have worked so far. Would be good to see more international publicity for this story though.

nature's chemistry

In the long list of potential books that I didn't quite get to the printers, there's one that I wanted to call Nature's chemistry - essentially a collection of snappy stories from the chemistry/biology interface. I think this idea came up just at the wrong time, namely at the point when my German publishers, Wiley-VCH gave up on such collections of stories. Previously they had been quite happy to publish them in their series Erlebnis Wissenschaft, probably based on the success of John Emsley's work in German translation, not so much on the success of my books.

Anyhow, Nature's chemistry never happened, and it never occurred to me to add the word amazing to the title. Now Michael Freemantle did just that , and with that magic ingredient he managed to get it published with the Royal Society of Chemistry, so well done to him. I was grateful to learn from his book about the chemistry of snowdrops (on the cover) and beaver excrements, but predictably more critical when reading about fields I have also covered. Overall, I guess it will face the same amount of disinterest from the general public as my books, so I suspect I should be supportive in solidarity.

My review of the book is now out in the January issue of Chemistry & Industry:

Made better by nature

Chemistry & Industry Volume 90, Issue 1, January 2026, Page 35

access via:

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on the origins of radio

Some thoughts on:

Listen in: How radio changed the home
Beaty Rubens
Bodleian Library Publishing 2025

I saw this small exhibition at the Weston Library last year and came away with not much more than some memories of a few old radios and covers of early editions of the Radio Times (published since 1923). It wouldn’t have occurred to me to invest £ 30 in the accompanying book. Less than a year later, however, I spotted it in a street library and picked it up. That’s the thing with street libraries, you can always return what you don’t like, so there’s zero risk in trying something out.

In the event I surprised myself by reading the entire book cover to cover. It starts from the invention of radio and the first technologies that enabled pioneering spirits to “listen in” (as they said in the 1920s) from the comfort of their own homes, albeit with the discomfort of fiddly equipment and bulky headphones.

Rubens describes the impact broadcasting had on home life in Britain, from its start in 1922 until the second world war - after which television sets started to invade homes and diminish the importance of radio. Of special interest to me was the ambiguous role of radio in giving access to culture (including eg live music) to households, but in many cases replacing the live entertainment that people were making for themselves before (gramophones and TV sets were also complicit in this). By making some of the best performances of classical music, for instance, available to all, broadcasting discouraged mere mortals from trying for themselves, because they would not be able to compete. This led to today’s situation where playing your own music has become a niche hobby, while most people think of music as something that streams out of their devices.

It was instructive to me to follow this development in the UK setting, not only because the BBC pioneered the technology, but also because in Germany we have the “1000 years” interlude where the Volksempfänger was Joseph Goebbels’ propaganda machine and the medium had to be reinvented after the collapse. As Rubens briefly mentions, part of the idea of rolling out a cheap and cheerful radio for all to the entire population was that these devices didn’t have the power to pick up foreign stations, so they tied listeners to the Nazi propaganda.

As it happens, I don’t know whether the musicians starring in my musical memoir had radio in the 1920s. Both Frieda the pianist and Heinrich the cellist will have had radio after the war, and both households went to join neighbours for shared TV viewing, but about the radio listening of the 1920s I am entirely in the dark, which made Rubens’s findings from early sociological studies of radio listening interesting.

Another very interesting thing I learned from the book was the earlier existence of systems that transmitted audio from theatre or music events live through phone lines to paying subscribers. This was first demonstrated in France in 1881 as the théâtrophone, and found commercial use there and in Britain (as the electrophone in 1896). Marcel Proust is among the few contemporary users of the service who left us written testimony. Allegedly there is no written testimony from subscribers to the British service, but I am struggling to believe that. I’m sure it’s out there somewhere, in some old letters kept in a drawer. The number of electrophone users in Britain peaked at just over 2,000 in 1923, before the technology was swept away by the wireless.

The book comes with lavish illustrations (as you would expect from a volume accompanying an exhibition) with historic photos, cartoons and covers of magazines. What is sorely missing is a timeline - as I discovered when trying to find the dates I referenced above. Wikipedia has one for developments globally, from which I learned that Argentina started broadcasting entertainment programmes in 1920. The book didn’t mention that either. The centenary to which the book and the exhibition were pegged is that of the first broadcasts from the 500ft tall Borough Hill transmitter near Daventry in Northamptonshire, which for the first time reached most of the UK in the summer of 1925.

Here's a review in the Observer (when it was still part of the Guardian group)

bridges of folly

Some thoughts on

Folly Bridge: A romantic tale
by D. L. Murray
Hodder and Stoughton 1945

I used to think that the folly of Folly Bridge was the unusual house with the statues enshrined in the walls (No. 5 Folly Bridge) but this book taught me about the real folly, a gate tower that was actually sitting on the bridge and was known as Friar Bacon's Study until it was demolished in 1779. In the "romantic tale" the building burns down as a consequence of the fictional events related, set in two subsequent academic years the 1770s. Lord North shows up as Prime Minister (which he was between 1770 and 1782) and the timing is further narrowed down by the fact that another bridge, the Petty Pont across the Cherwell, is being rebuilt (1772-78) as the structure we now know as Magdalen Bridge. So let's say 1777-1779.

The story is an elaborated plot of students and robbers reminiscent of the 19th century robber romances around figures like Schinderhannes in Germany. The message seems to be that Oxford in that time was such a corrupting place that it turned an innocent boy from a village rectory into a hardened criminal within one academic year. So there's definitely more than one interpretation to the folly of the title. There doesn't seem to be much learning going on between the college dinners, academic ceremonies and church services. Towns folk only occur as mobs watching executions or seeking to fight with students, and the roles of Gypsies as criminals and a Jew as moneylender are also stuck in cliché.

I mainly read the book for the intriguing sights of 18th century Oxford, assisted by a historical map I happen to have (see photo below). Most of the places are genuine, but the college featured in the novel is imagined (as are the out of town locations Vailbury Park and Little Mildington). The imaginary Maryol College is on the site of the Cistercian Abbey of Rewley (behind today's Said Business School). At the dissolution of the monasteries, the last abbot of Rewley did suggest turning it into a college, so we're in the fictional world where that initiative succeeded.

Apart from the tower on the bridge (also accessible by boat via the pillars of the bridge), I also enjoyed the descriptions of the "Venetian quarter" with all the waterways around Oxford Castle (top left in the photo below), most of which have been filled in since. We should bring some of those back, if only to give the river space and prevent flooding. Speaking of waterways, the Oxford Canal was under construction in the 1770s, but still far from reaching Oxford. The last stretch into central Oxford was only opened in 1790. Accordingly, it doesn't get a mention in the book.

David Leslie Murray (1888-1962) was editor of the Times Literary Supplement in his day job. He has also written novels tied to other specific cities, including Regency (1936; Brighton) and Enter Three Witches (1942; London).

my copy of the book (it came without the dustjacket, which apparently shows Friar Bacon's study) on top of the historical map I used. Folly Bridge appears at the bottom of the photo. Own photo.

thinking about AI

I'm torn between thinking that generative AI (in the shape of ChatGTP and such like) is a fundamentally bad idea that will accelerate our demise and, alternatively, that it is just a silly hype that will pass. It was therefore really instructive to read this book which offers background on the history of AI and a balanced view of the present overhyped situation. Turns out that the author, with decades of experience in this field, is also unsure as to whether AI will be our ruin. Oh well. Still worth reading though.

How to think about AI - a guide for the perplexed
Richard Susskind
OUP 2025
ISBN: 9780198941927

Alternatively, read my long essay review of the book which is out now in the November issue of C&I:

AI for the perplexed

Chemistry & Industry Volume 89, Issue 11, November 2025, Page 35

access via:

Wiley Online Library (paywalled PDF of the whole review section)

SCI (premium content, ie members only)

As always, I can send a PDF on request.

OUP

Update 2.1.2025 I only got access to the published version and found out that the word "enshittification" has been edited out without my knowledge. Must have been one of those enshittifying AI bots at work ... For the record, the relevant sentence (near the middle of the text) reads in my manuscript:

In addition to all these concerns, I am also seeing many programming and computer professionals (eg on Mastodon) worrying about the degradation of the world wide web and human interactions in general, a trend often described by the (almost) technical term “enshittification”.

origins of Summertown

Some thoughts on:

The Butcher, The Tailor, The Picture-Frame Maker...
Stories of Middle Way
Gareth Winrow
The Book Guild 2023

The author investigates the history of the house he lives in and the land it stands on, which is interesting to me because it happens to be in Oxford, and it offers an unusual angle on the history of our city. As a family history researcher, I am also interested in how such projects work for others and how they translate into books. (I've actually used the butcher et al line for a blog entry myself.)

There are some challenges inherent to Winrow's project: His house is only less than a century old. It was built after 1928 on the land of the former Summerhill estate which was auctioned off in 1925. Summertown as a village is only two centuries old and doesn't have a wildly interesting history.

Winrow found the stories he connects to his address not in the actual house nor on the plot it stands on. He looked more widely into the lives of the people who happened to own the land over the last few centuries, along with their ancestry and business connections, making for a vast cast of characters most of whom have only a tenuous connection to the place of interest. The main characters and land-owners are (note that the first four died before the house was built):

• Elizabeth Buswell (1725-1815) who was sentenced to death for poisoning her housemaid and pardoned at the last minute by King George II.
• Henry John North (1756-1831), a lawyer, town clerk and land speculator based in Woodstock;
• John Brain (1798-1855), a butcher who mysteriously disappeared after the death of his young wife;
• James Ryman (c.1795-1880), a picture-frame maker and art dealer who befriended luminaries of the Victorian art world such as Turner and Ruskin (no indication whether he's related to Henry Ryman, founder of the stationery business);
• Florence Bocker (1909-2001), the widow of a colonial officer in Burma, actually lived at the address in question for several decades.

All of these stories are interesting in their own way, but I'm coming away with the impression that the house in question is getting overlooked. We learn virtually nothing about it from the lives of these landowners, and it just serves as an excuse to snoop into these past lives. We don't even get a description of the premises or an insight into the original shape and size, before the recent owners built their extensions.

The exciting things mostly happen in central Oxford (eg the picture frame maker's connection to Turner's famous views of Oxford), sometimes further afield, even as far as India and Burma, but rarely in Summertown. Thus, cycling through Summertown after reading the book

To me as a fellow family history researcher it is interesting that all of these characters come with a well-researched family history, but I feel for the general reader this is just a bit too nerdy and burdened with detail. Which explains the publishing format.

My house is a bit older and I have looked into its history only very fleetingly, but I wouldn't quite dare trying to make a book out of it ...

There is a clue in the cover as well, which shows the Radcliffe Camera rather than a view of Summertown.

where our waste ends up

We do like to think that the stuff we put into recycling bins or return to shops will be neatly disassembled and reconfigured into new products. Unfortunately, a lot of it ends up creating an unsavoury mess in less fortunate countries like Turkey, Ghana or Indonesia, as Alexander Clapp reports in harrowing detail here. Many of the things going wrong with the global waste flows have also been reported elsewhere, but it is shocking to see them all in one place:

Waste wars: Dirty Deals, International Rivalries and the Scandalous Afterlife of Rubbish
Alexander Clapp
John Murray 2025

For a first impression, read my long essay review of the book which is out now in the October issue of C&I:

What a waste

Chemistry & Industry Volume 89, Issue 10, October 2025, Page 36

access via:

Wiley Online Library (paywalled PDF of the whole review section)

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Blackwell's