Mar 11 2026

Book review: Four Points of the Compass by Jerry Brotton

My next review is of Four points of the Compass: The Unexpected History of Direction by Jerry Brotton. I read his book A History of the World in 12 Maps in 2013,

One might imagine that the history of the four points of the compass was a rather brief affair, and Four points is a relatively short book. However, it packs a lot in because the compass points are more than just geography – they encompass religion, culture and politics.

The book starts with an “orientation” chapter followed by chapters on east, south, north and west and finishes with one entitled “The blue dot”. In this case the blue dot is us; our marker on the map we now find on our phone. A fitting end since Brotton starts by talking about the Apollo 17 “Blue Marble” photograph – not to be mistaken for Carl Sagan’s “Pale Blue Dot” taken by Voyager 1 as it passed beyond Saturn in 1980. Brotton sees the rise of our blue dot on a phone as an end of the compass directions.

It is easy, particularly for the map obsessed, to think of the cardinal directions of the compass as being almost timeless, and it takes some prompting to recall that the words North, South, East and West have meanings beyond those physical directions. This is highlighted in the “Orientation” chapter.

The other source of direction in the human world is based on our own body: left, right, front, back, up and down. This creeps into the compass direction with the etymology of some languages linked to them, i.e. north is the left of east. The Guugu Yimithirr people of Queensland Australia don’t bother with these egocentric directions, referencing everything to the compass (“please, pass the salt to your west”). The up and down directions rarely feature alongside the compass directions, with the exception of Mesoamericans who for a considerable period added up as a fifth cardinal direction.

The first written references to compass-like directions are from the Akkadian culture from around 2000 BCE. They are compass-like since they relate to prevailing winds and weather rather than magnetic or astronomical dirctions. The second phenomena prompting direction, and probably the primary one is the sun which rises in the east and sets in the west. The invention of compass north and south comes rather later with the Chinese discovering what they called “south pointing stones” around 200 BCE. Magnetic compasses only became common as directional aids in 12th century in Europe. It wasn’t until William Gilbert’s work De Magnete published in 1600 that the earth’s magnetic field was understood in broad terms, and recognised as not aligning with astronomical definitions of direction – the magnetic North Pole is hundreds of miles from the point where the earth’s rotational axis surfaces in the Arctic. The difference becomes important for longer voyages.

From a religious point of view the east was initially important as the location of the rising sun, and represented birth with the opposite direction, west, representing death and sometimes rebirth. The Jewish faith, Christianity and Islam tried at the beginning to break this link to distinguish themselves from earlier sun worship but in the end succumbed to the east being a special direction. Christian churches have long been oriented with the altar at the east, and burials with the head to the west. In Islam the great expansion of the Islamic Empire was along the North African coast which meant praying in the direction of Mecca meant facing east. Geographically medieval maps of the world placed the east at the top. Mercator placed the north at the top of his 1569 map of the world but this seems to have been more a convenience than a matter of principle for him. He was mapping primarily for east-west journeys which fit better with north at the top.

North and south do not appear to have had strong religious connotations, culturally their meaning varied over time. The south represented unbearable heat from the point of view of ancient Mediterranean civilisations and the north every increasingly harsh conditions with fanciful notions as to what happened at the North Pole (which continued through to Mercator’s time at least). Later Thomas More and Francis Bacon would locate their Utopias in the far south.

These days North, South, East and West all have strong political meanings although these vary with context, in the UK the North has been associated with poverty, depravation and decline whilst in the US and Italy the opposite is true. On a global scale we talk about the wealthy Global North and the developing Global South. The West has long been a place of political aspiration, the East represented the old Soviet Union and Japan.

For me the biggest idea in this book was think of the compass beyond physical direction, it also provided a handy supply of pub quiz facts all in all a short yet thought provoking read.

Feb 16 2026

Book review: The Flawed Genius of William Playfair by David R. Bellhouse

My next review is of The Flawed Genius of William Playfair by David R. Bellhouse. I’ve long had a professional interest in data visualisation, William Playfair is a name frequently mentioned in terms of the invention of several types of chart (line, area, bar and pie charts).

Playfair led an interesting life, fleeing from the French Revolution at one point, and spending several spells in debtors prison.

He was born in Scotland in 1759 and died in 1823. His brothers James and John are notable in the own right as an architect and mathematician respectively.

He apprenticed as an engineer in Scotland and went on to work as a draughtsman for James Watt in Birmingham at the Boulton and Watt works between 1777 and 1780.

It is not discussed in this book but Watt and Boulton were probably close to the origin of engineering drawings as we know them now. They needed them to ensure the parts of the engines they sold, made by multiple manufacturers, would fit together. They also had a business model which saw them paid on the basis of how much money they saved their customers. So Playfair would have a combination of the technical skills required to produce data visualisations, and work for a business that had some call for them. It is interesting to note that another person noted for his innovative visualisations was Charles Joseph Minard, a civil engineer.

Playfair would also likely have had knowledge of Priestley’s Chart of Biography (1765) – a sort of timeline diagram, which plotted the lives and deaths of famous people in history, and the New Chart of History (1769) which showed world history in a similar manner. Priestley was a member of the Lunar Society, as was Matthew Boulton.

At the end of his contract with Watt and Boulton Playfair took on their document copier business, arising from an idea by Erasmus Darwin, patented by James Watt. Playfair seems to have set up the manufacturing process for the machines to a high standard but then left to set up his own business.

This business followed on from the type of manufacturing work that Boulton did, making small metal items with machines. It did not go particularly well, he resumed attempts to set up a manufacturing business on moving to Paris in 1787. His view was that the French were trailing the British in their Industrial Revolution so represented a better opportunity than England, where he would always be competing with Boulton. When in France he also made a proposal to replace the “Machine de Marley” which supplied water to Versailles from the Seine – in this he was unsuccessful. He also set up a bank, as well as being involved in the Scioto Company, which looked to sell land in America to French refugees – an issue here was that the company didn’t actually own any land in America!

Playfair left Paris in 1792, as the Reign of Terror started – he had been peripherally involved in the French Revolution at the beginning but later he became strongly opposed. Supporting the British government in their war with Napoleon – he worked as a journalist, proposed a semaphore telegraph scheme and played some part in a scheme to damage the French economically with a scheme for forging French “assignats” – a form of paper currency used in revolutionary France.

It was just prior to moving to Paris that his writing career started, and his first published works in data visualisation: The Commercial and Political Atlas. The data visualisations were the key novelty here, Atlas uses charts to illustrate economic data. Playfair was showing an increasing interest in economics, meeting Adam Smith in 1787, and also writing a pamphlet on interest rates The regulation of the interest of money. He also edited a version of Smith’s Wealth of Nations after his death.

He also wrote extensively on politics, propounding his views on Jacobins, Catholics, the Irish, and the economy. I was a bit lost here since Bellhouse never tells us what a Jacobin is or the broader historical and economic background. Playfair was in favour of a landed gentry continuing to run the country, and against reform of the parliamentary system. Reviews at the time seem to indicate he was a poor writer with not particularly profound opinions. His British Family Antiquity had the side-effect of bankrupting his publisher, although not Playfair himself (this time).

In his desperation for cash he engaged in low level extortion, effectively writing to people he felt might have money and describing how someone was about to write terrible things about them and he was the man to stop them, for small renumeration. One gets the impression from Bellhouse that this was not uncommon at the time.

Ultimately his attempt to set up a bank in England led to his being imprisoned in debtors prison. His Original Security Bank was established in 1797. It provided notes of convenient denomination in exchange for Bank of England notes. It was clearly designed to take advantage of an evolving situation in banking – the Bank of England had recently stopped exchanging paper money for gold as a result of the war with the French. It presented high “regulatory risk”, in fact the founders, Playfair included were briefly imprisoned for forgery.

As it was the Original Security Bank was quickly wound up, as a result of competition and mismanagement and it is from this bankruptcy that Playfair’s multiple trips to debtors prison arose – the first in 1809. He seems to have come off badly relative to his partners in the bank. Being imprisoned for debt meant that his ability to go into business in future was very limited, hence he leant heavily on his writing. The early 19th century was a different time in terms of how bankruptcy was handled – imprisonment in special debtors prison was routine – a practice that ended in 1869 Debtor’s Act. Playfair formed friendships with other debtors whilst in prison, and these were pretty much the only people he could go into business with – several were outright fraudsters and so this did not go well for him.

In the background to all this he was married to Mary Morris possibly in 1780 when their first child, John, was born although wedding banns were read for them in 1795. They had four children, one of whom was blind and thus needed support throughout her life. One wonders how much Playfair was responsible for the financial support of his family.

I have mixed feelings about this book, it is pretty readable but although the author mentions and illustrates Playfair’s work on data visualisation one gets the impression his interest is more in economics, politics and debt. This may simply be an accurate reflection of Playfair’s life but I was more interested in the data visualisation side of his career.

Jan 12 2026

Book review: Neurotribes by Steve Silberman

Following on from my earlier reviews of books on autism this one is of Neurotribes: The Untold History of Autism and the Potential of Neurodiversity by Steve Silberman.

The book is chronological with a couple of lengthy forewords and an introduction by Silberman describing his original contact with the autistic community stemming from the Silicon Valley culture in 2000.

It is easy to see autism as a modern illness, before the eighties clinically defined autism was very rare. However, even under the strict original definitions there were people like 18th century scientist Henry Cavendish who we would identify as autistic. Cavendish did the same walk every day, changing it only once when he met some people on his usual route after which he always used his new route, he ate a leg of mutton every evening. He attended the Royal Society once a week, where his colleagues were touchingly neuroaffirmative – they valued his contributions but knew to talk in his presence to elicit his input rather than talk to him directly – which would cause him to flee. Cavendish flourished because he came from a wealthy family which could support both his scientific tendencies and his personal oddities.

The term “autism”, as we understand it now, was first used almost simultaneously by Leo Kanner in the US in the diagnosis of “early infantile autism,” and Hans Asperger in Austria with the diagnosis “autistic psychopathy” in papers published in 1943 and 1944. The term autism had been coined by Paul Bleuler in 1911 to describe certain symptoms of schizophrenia – a focus on an inner world or the self. Autism was seen as a childhood presentation of schizophrenia.

Asperger worked in the Children’s Clinic in Vienna, he saw his role as finding the special skills of his patients which could be developed so that they could go on to lead fulfilling and hopefully independent lives.

The Children’s Clinic was to become central to the Nazi euthanasia program which saw the murder of nearly 800 children. A survey from a similar institute in Saxony in 1920 had asked effectively “Would it be ok if your child died in our care, you know, a bit “accidentally”.” to which the answer in some cases the answer was “Why are you asking us? Get on with it”. It was here that the Nazi eugenics programs originated. Asperger was at least complicit in this and his work was consequently ignored until the late eighties.

Kanner was Jewish born in the Ukraine 1896 but had left his job as a doctor in Germany in 1923 largely for economic reasons. He had written a book called Child Psychiatry in 1935 and went on to be the head of child psychiatry at the Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore. He later employed two of Asperger’s former colleagues in his clinic at Johns Hopkins, they were Jewish and had fled the Nazis.

Until the 1950s the standard “treatment” for autistic children and indeed anyone with mental illness was institutionalisation in organisations with names like “Home for Non-educable feebleminded children”. As an aside the original name for the UK’s autistic society was the “Society for Psychotic Children”! Over the years various scandals were unearthed regarding these institutions. It wasn’t until the seventies that the US and UK moved to a legal framework in which disabled people had a right to education rather than institutionalisation.

Both Asperger and Kanner had a very narrow view of what constituted autism seeing it has having a very strict set of criteria, restricted to children. Under their criteria incidence was something like 4 in 10000 children. It wasn’t until Lorna Wing’s work in the eighties that Asperger’s work was finally recognised and the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) was updated with new, broader diagnostic criteria. It was from Wing that the term “autistic spectrum” came into being. Even in the early nineties there was debate as to whether autism existed in adults. Nowadays the incidence of a more broadly defined neurodiversity is somewhere in the region of 15-20% of the population.

Diagnosis is about providing support – Wing saw that a lot of children needed support – he daughter included – and were failed by diagnosis. At one point a researcher says that for their research work in autism they applied diagnostic criteria rigorously whilst in private practice they were more permissive so that their patients could get the support they needed. All through the period covered by the book some autistic people have made it through to independent adulthood but it has been dependent on the support they are given. As Kanner said “if one factor is significantly useful, it is a sympathetic and tolerant reception by the school”.

If the environment changes to make life easier then there is less need for diagnosis. We could think of the “diagnosis crisis” as an “environment crisis”, we are building environments – particularly schools which are increasingly challenging for neurodiverse people.

The film “Rain Man”, released in 1989, was an amalgam of several people in real life familiar to the screenwriter Barry Morrow. It produced a sea change in the way autistic people were viewed by wider society.

All through the book parents and their children are central. Many times clinicians observed parents to be rather obsessive about their children’s condition and more often than not at least a bit autistic themselves. Even some of the clinicians involved were neurodivergent. Major figures in the book like Bernie Rimland started their journey as parents of autistic children determined to do their best for them. This is reflected today in the parents of autistic children, who in my experience have very deep knowledge of the bureaucratic systems to navigate in order to get support.

For a long time the focus of parents and the medical establishment has been finding a cure for autism, and there has always been a population of snake oil salesmen willing to sell that cure (or at least find a cause to blame). Autism was variously attributed to mothers, vaccines, vitamin deficiencies and ultimately genes depending on the mores of the time. Treatments were at times absolutely brutal – until quite recently electrocuting autistic children to change their behaviour was legal. This is where the anti-vaccine movement comes in rising to prominence as a result of the large increase in autism diagnosis due to the change in diagnostic criteria.

Nowadays more and more autistic people are saying they are not looking for a cure but rather a society that provides relevant accommodations. The cause of autism is generally seen as genetic, not a result of parents, the environment, vaccines or medicines.

The final chapters talk about autistic people being able to speak for themselves, starting in the late eighties with Temple Grandin. It is from this period that the terms neurodiverse and neurotypical come. The internet is core to this – social media often work well for autistic people since much of the social complexity is removed. One wonders how banishing children from social media will work for this group. The role that social media plays is not a new thing, in the early to mid-20th century ham radio and science fiction provided a community for many who would now be described as somewhat neurodivergent.

I loved this book, it is highly readable and it speaks to my concerns not only for my son but also for me.

Dec 31 2025

Review of the year: 2025

Another year passes, the key news is that T(now 13) has grown massively, he is taller than both of us now and has gone through three shoe sizes in the last year. I’ve been googling “How to bonsai a teenager”! Online school is working out pretty well, T wants to return to mainstream school in the Autumn – a small, relaxed one with intake at the start of GCSEs.

After a couple of years of long COVID I’m back to running again but I’m only able to build up slowly. I also managed holidays to North Wales, and Dorset – back to the homeland – which I haven’t been up to for a few years.

I’m sort of retired – circumstances make looking for work a little challenging at the moment also it turns out not working is quite nice!

This year I published 18 book reviews, a game review (for Black Myth Wukong) and a Rosetta stone post on Rust, the programming language. I’ve actually read four further books on school leadership and behaviour – reviews to be published at AFIS.

I had several themes in the books I read this year; one theme was autism: Understanding Pathological Demand Avoidance Syndrome in Children by Phil Christie, Margaret Duncan, Ruth Fidler and Zara Healey was a bit academic. The books by Dr Naomi Fisher and Eliza Fricker, The Teenager’s Guide to Burnout and When the Naughty Step Makes Things Worse were much better and more helpful – they have a bit of a cult following amongst parents of neurodiverse children. Untypical by Pete Wharmby is a combination of a personal memoir and a guide to making life easier for autistic people, I think the major takeaway for me was the ongoing stress of trying to fit in to systems not designed for the neurodiverse.

I also read three books on Africa by African authors: An African History of Africa by Zeinab Badawi, Africa is not a country by Dipo Faloyin and It’s a Continent by Astrid Madimba and Chinny Ukata. Badawi’s book is encyclopaedic – from the earliest African civilisations finishing briefly with the post-War independence movements. It feels like a jumping off point for further reading. Faloyin’s book was my favourite of these three, partly for his pastiche of How to write about Africa an essay by Binyavanga Wainaina but also it was more explicitly an African view of Africa. All three books attempt to give an equal coverage of the 54 diverse countries of Africa which in a way is a drawback because Africa is so diverse.

Also in history, I read about Mesopotamian cultures The Library of Ancient Wisdom by Selena Wisnom. I struggled to decide between Science and Islam – A History by Ehsan Masood and Pathfinders – The Golden Age of Arabic Science by Jim Al-Khalili in reading about Islamic Science, so I read both. Wisnom’s book is perhaps my favourite of the three – it describes the rich literature of Mesopotamia written on clay tablets in cuneiform, spanning thousands of years. I read about Islamic Science because it was a gap in my knowledge of the history of science. Masood and Al-Khalili’s books are both fascinating and readable, Al-Khalili’s book talks more about the detail of the science and his personal connection to the region. They both do a good job of highlighting that the so called “Dark Ages” were only so for Northern Europeans, and how the work of Arabic scholars was critical to the Renaissance.

After binging on Roman history last year, I just read Roads in Roman Britain by Hugh Davies this year. A sort of retirement project for the author, who had worked as a civil engineer. For the purposes of understanding my own retirement I read Retirement – the psychology of reinvention by Kenneth Shultz, I think my main takeaway from this was that it would have been better to start thinking about retirement a few years before retiring! Related to retirement I got Brilliant Bread by James Morton – a fine collection of bread recipes which I have been following. Six Thousand Years of Bread by H.E. Jacob was a rather idiosyncratic history of bread.

Several books didn’t fit into a broader theme, 1666 – Plague, War and Hellfire by Rebecca Rideal – it centres on London, the Plague is the Black Death, the Hellfire is the Great Fire of London and the War is one of the Anglo-Dutch Wars. The book cast the Black Death and Fire in a different light for me, having learnt of them as a child in the seventies. The Book-Makers by Adam Smyth – through which I discovered one of my former colleagues runs a small press – talks about the technical process of printing, the evolution of the form of the book and the business of printing. A History of the World in 47 Borders by Jonn Elledge, difficult to summarise briefly but perhaps the most interesting takeaway for me was that the modern nation state is a 17th century invention. These last two titles I picked up browsing in a bookshop.

Finally there was Kindred – Neanderthal Life, Love, Death and Art by Rebecca Wragg Sykes – a review of where we are now in understanding Neanderthals – it’s fair to say our understanding has come on a lot since the seventies when I first learned of them.

This coming year I’m hoping to build up my running, and work out how to be retired. Hopefully I’ll be able to get out and about more as the year progresses.

Dec 11 2025

Book review: Pathfinders – The Golden Age of Arabic Science by Jim Al-Khalili

I recently read Science and Islam by Ehsan Masood having struggled to decide whether to read it, or Pathfinders: The Golden Age of Arabic Science by Jim Al-Khalili – it turns out I read both. This is a review of Pathfinders. In reading al-Khalili’s book I was looking for a bit more science than Science and Islam offered.

Al-Khalili is an interesting author for this topic, he was born and raised in Baghdad so learnt something of Arabic Science through school – visiting some of the key sites and living in the city where the Golden Age started. He is also conscious of his separate Persian identity – his family are from Iran.

The book covers the history of the Islamic Empire briefly at the beginning before a series of thematic chapters finishing with one on the decline of Arabic Science during the early modern period and the rise of science in Europe during the Renaissance and a final chapter on Islam and Science in the modern era. As well as notes there are a couple of appendices: one a glossary of scientists, a handy addition with the number of scientists introduced in the book, and an interesting 2D timeline which showed both regimes (such as the Abbasids) and location (from Spain to Iran) which I found really helpful. In a break from my tradition, I reproduce it here.

Timeline: The Islamic World from Antiquity to the Beginning of the Modern Period from Pathfinders by Jim Al-Khalili

Much of the book is focussed on Baghdad where the translation project kicked off under the reign of the seventh Abbasid Caliph al-Ma’mun in the 9th century, alongside this a number of high profile Arab scientist worked, adding to that which they translated. There is an emphasis here on the translation from Persian and Indian sources as well as Greek. Al-Khalili sees the translation of Persian sources and those relating astrology as a bigger motivation than I think is commonly accepted.

I arrived at Pathfinders and Islam and Science by consulting my Bluesky followers, they favoured the Ehsan Masood book although Ehsan Masood liked Jim Al-Khalili’s book for his better access to Arabic sources. I can see why my history of science crowd were not so pleased with Pathfinders. In several places Al-Khalili casts aspersions on historians which I imagine is grating coming from a theoretical physicist and populariser of science.

Perhaps the most significant deviation from orthodoxy in his treatment of al-Ma’mun’s House of Wisdom. Al-Khalili tends to the strong view of it as a proto-University or research centre combining both a library and a workplace for scholars. The more mainstream view amongst historians gives it the status of a library, and on the other extreme there are those who doubt its very existence.

It’s difficult to do justice to the range of scientific subjects covered in Pathfinders, chapters include chemistry, astronomy (several times), numbers, algebra, philosophy, and medicine. Topics such as the invention of zero, and measurements of the size of the earth and optics are discussed in considerable technical detail.

The surprising thing for me was how long it took Arabic/Indian numbers to take hold in Europe (the French Audit Office was still using Roman numerals in the 18th century), and people like Simon Stevin, mathematician, were using their own odd formulation of decimal numbers in the 16th century. Some of this was due to a reluctance to use Arabic inventions apparently this also slowed the uptake of coffee in Western Europe.

Geber the Alchemist (Jabir ibn-Hayyan) gets a chapter pretty much of his own, Al-Khalili describes him as the founder of chemistry. His publication record is obscured by the fact that his name seems to have been attached as author to documents for several centuries after his death. What he actually wrote could be rather cryptic and it is from him that the English word “gibberish” comes. Jabir wrote on both chemistry and its mystical twin, alchemy. He appears to have attracted more opprobrium for this than Isaac Newton who also studied alchemy.

As an aside at the end of the chapter on physicists Al-Khalili points out that Al-Haytham, al-Razi and al-Biruni were using the scientific method long before it was supposedly invented in the early 17th century by Francis Bacon and Rene Descartes.

Although Baghdad was central in the early years of the Golden Age – the 9th and 10th centuries – later on Islamic Spain particularly Cordoba were important. Even after the Mongol sacking of Baghdad in 1256 observational astronomy continued by Arab scientists under Mongol rulers. Al-Khalili’s point here is that Arabic science continued beyond the traditional golden era and was only surpassed by Europe in the mid-fifteenth century. He sees the failure of printing in Arabic to take off as one of the reasons for its final decline. He notes that may have been due in part to an early printing of the Qur’an containing errors which would have been considered a serious offence.

Al-Khalili draws a parallel between the Abbasid translation effort, and the Renaissance translation work sponsored by the Medici family in Florence. Also important in bringing Greek and other works via Arabic was Toledo which became a Christian centre for learning after the fall of the Islamic Empire in Spain.

As a Western European brought up in the seventies and eighties, I was taught that the Renaissance as an effort of translating works directly from ancient Greece and the scientific method came out of Western European thought. In truth it was part of a more continuous process with the work of Arabic scholars spanning the gap back to ancient Greece with translations to Latin from Arabic. Al-Khalili uses the example of Copernicus who cites a number of Arabic scholars but his publications, and historical work over the last 100 years or so, show that the influences may well go deeper.

I enjoyed Pathfinders, I liked the focus on the science side of things, having had a more thorough coverage of the political side of things from Masood’s book. I also liked that some of Al-Khalili’s upbringing in Baghdad came through. It has prompted me to look up books on Indian science in the first millennia and pre-Renaissance science in Europe.