Wednesday, 30 March 2022

African Rhinos: Questions of Black and White

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When I was writing about rhinoceroses recently, I noticed that even some of the most respectable sources of information repeated the story o...
Friday, 25 March 2022

Longevity of Fellows of the Royal Society

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In my last article I showed how Fellows of the Royal Society born around 1870 lived about 4 years longer than the man in the street who had ...
Thursday, 24 March 2022

How long did Fellows of the Royal College of Physicians and Fellows of the Royal Society live compared with the Man in the Street and Generals of the First World War?

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In the previous article I showed that senior officers in the First World War, the ‘Generals’ lived approximately 4 years longer on average t...
Wednesday, 23 March 2022

How long did First World War Generals live compared with the Man in the Street?

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In 2018, 100 years after the ending of the First World War, I read the Haig’s War Diaries. The editors had provided in footnotes a potted hi...
Monday, 21 March 2022

E.B. Verney’s Speech: a Physiologist’s View of Economics

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In reading about something or somebody, the serendipitous finding of a little gem is sometimes the reward. Ernest Basil Verney’s (1894-1967)...

Strange Cargo: Ray Densham’s film and Audrey and Ivor Noël Hume’s hatching tortoises

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On 24 February , I recounted the story of the the film Strange Cargo and how I first learnt of its existence. Ivor and Audrey Noël Hume ref...
Tuesday, 15 March 2022

John H Tashjian. Herpetologist, photographer and fighter pilot celebrated his 100th birthday in the air—in the aircraft he flew 77 years previously

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When I wrote about marsupial frogs ( Gastrotheca ) last May, I showed the illustration from Doris Cochran’s Living Amphibians of the World ...