It’s one of the biggest puzzles in modern astronomy: Based on multiple observations of stars and galaxies, the universe seems to be flying apart faster than our best models of the cosmos predict it should. Evidence of this conundrum has been accumulating for years, causing some researchers to call it a looming crisis in cosmology.
Now a group of researchers using the Hubble Space Telescope has compiled a massive new dataset, and they’ve found a-million-to-one odds that the discrepancy is a statistical fluke. In other words, it’s looking even more likely that there’s some fundamental ingredient of the cosmos—or some unexpected effect of the known ingredients—that astronomers have yet to pin down.
Budding novelists are advised not to edit, or even look back at their work; instead they should just keep moving forward with a whopping word-count as their main goal. This “quantity not quality” approach is not entirely dissimilar to the advice writers such as Stephen King give: just get the damn thing on the page and worry about making it good later.
Now I am about to become a debut novelist, I decide to plan it in depth as soon as I’ve taken my two children swimming, sorted the food shop, found my mum a birthday present … oh god, it’s 1 November already …
Neale's inner poet roams free in the shorter work, while in the longer stories her natural inclination for wordplay and subtle rhyme tends to be more hidden, like gems awaiting excavation.
If you’ve never thought about the Middle Ages, or assumed it was too distant to be relevant, this book is a good place to start. Jones has a knack for gripping detail and vivid evocation. I’m not likely to forget the Viking warrior Rollo, whose henchman flipped the Carolingian king Charles the Simple onto his backside so he could kiss the royal foot without kneeling in obeisance. I enjoyed with grim recognition the extended story of 14th-century professors in Paris trying to distance themselves from Philip IV’s smear campaign against the Templars, the military order that had gained too much power for his comfort — but not so far as to lose favor with the king. Jones writes with drive and energy (despite some lazy chestnut phrases). And he makes medieval characters seem as shrewd, loutish or heroic as ourselves.
In the slanting drift of afternoon, even as
night begins to fall, made patterns of thought