quote [ Taking dictation, revising manuscripts, typing copies, literary amanuenses often labour for little compensation and even less recognition. Christine Jacobson explores the neglected efforts of women like Theodora Bosanquet, Véra Nabokov, and Valerie Eliot, who ? through their work as typists, editors, and champions ? had a profound impact on modern literature. ]

quote [ When coffee first arrived in England in the mid-17th century, it brought with it far more than a new beverage. It introduced a radically new social institution: the coffeehouse. For the price of a single penny?the cost of a cup of coffee?any man could enter, sit at a shared table, read the latest news, and join conversations that ranged from philosophy and science to politics, trade, and gossip. ]

quote [ Before the attention economy consumed our lives, ?pursuit tests? devised by the US military coupled man to machine with the aim of assessing focus under pressure. D. Graham Burnett explores these devices for evaluating aviators, finding a pre-history of the laboratory research that has relentlessly worked to slice and dice the attentional powers of human beings. ]

quote [ Behind the transformative star photographs of the 1880s lay a complex collaboration between astronomers and engravers. ]

quote [ The wine key helped make airtight wine bottles?and modern wine culture?possible. ]

quote [ In the late 1960s and early 1970s, the United States conducted one of the most ambitious experiments in human undersea habitation: Project Tektite. ]

quote [ How the shipping container, a dominant force in ocean shipping, came from a truck driver whose invention proved to be too good at its job. ]

quote [ In mid-19th century Italy, two eccentric aristocrats set forth on parallel projects: constructing ostentatious castles in a Moorish Revival style. Iván Moure Pazos tours the psychedelic chambers of Rochetta Mattei, optimised for electrohomeopathic healing, and Castello di Sammezzano, an immersive, orientalist fever dream. ]

quote [ Ash from the explosion may have led to crop failure and famine in southern Europe, leading some Italian cities to import grain?which possibly carried fleas infected with the bubonic plague ]

quote [ On a freezing January night in 1393, music and laughter filled the Hôtel Saint-Pol, a sprawling palace on the right bank of Paris. The French court had gathered for a masquerade ball in honour of a lady-in-waiting?s remarriage ? a diversion meant to lift the spirits of King Charles VI, a 24-year-old monarch already shadowed by bouts of mental instability. ]