By the beginning of the 1970s, the rock and roll movie had become a big tent covering a myriad of styles and intentions, some of the films very serious indeed. In Europe, auteurs Jean-Luc Godard and Michelangelo Antonioni both measured the rock scene and exploited it for their own artistic ends with Sympathy for the Devil/One Plus One and Blow-Up, respectively, while Britain’s Nicolas Roeg put a trippy and cryptic rock and roll spin on gangster movies with Performance starring Mick Jagger—a trick he would reproduce for science fiction films in 1976 with David Bowie in The Man Who Fell to Earth.
It's one of a few such devices held at the National Physical Laboratory in south-west London, helping to ensure that the world has an accurate shared sense of seconds, minutes and hours. They're called hydrogen masers, and they are extremely important atomic clocks. Along with around 400 others, placed all around the globe, they help the world define what time it is, right now, down to the nanosecond. Without these clocks – and the people, technology and procedures around them – the modern world would slowly drift into chaos. For many industries and technologies we rely upon, from satellite navigation to mobile phones, time is the "hidden utility".
So, how did we arrive at this shared system of timekeeping in the first place, how does it stay accurate, and how might it evolve in the future? The answers involve looking beyond the clockface to explore what time actually is. Dig a little deeper, and you soon discover that time is more of a human construct than first appears.
The stories all have McCall Smith’s characteristic charm, and make for easy and very pleasant reading. The short essays that introduce each story all invite thought. How should we behave when dealt a bad hand or experiencing injustice? Is it right to meet like with like? Sometimes it must be. Nevertheless, as in all McCall Smith’s work, we are reminded that the necessary quality in social life is kindness. Reading McCall Smith is always comforting, but there is an edge to his work too, for he does, in a quiet, well-mannered way, suggest that we look at ourselves, and that we should be as ready to judge ourselves as to condemn others; perhaps even readier.
To describe Elizabeth Hand as a mystery writer is to not have read another Elizabeth Hand book. Over decades, she has proved that she’s eclectic, genre-bending, and comfortable in fantasy and mystery, crime, myth, magic — and more. In “Hokuloa Road,” she explores the rich and diverse culture and environment of Hawaii — and seamlessly stitches this fascinating material into a girl-gone-missing story. It’s refreshingly and originally creepy.
Somewhere in the halls of hell, the terms “well researched” and “dull” were somehow conflated. The consequence is that books on historical subjects aimed at general readers either turn out to be simplistic or overburdened with minutiae. Happily, Angus Robertson has proven that the two adjectives need not be connected: he has written a thoroughly enjoyable history of Vienna which is both accurate and entertaining.
I have never known much about flowers.
I can smell something on them,
such that I want to cry;
because like all flowers they look like ideas.