This wide-ranging book takes in probability, fractals, astronomy, Babbage, Lovelace, and a host of other areas and people.

You settle down to read, and the subject of this particular vignette could be you: a teacher, a student, a mother, a brother.

Weimar, the birthplace of the optimistic but short-lived republic of the same name, a place called “home” by Goethe, Liszt and Nietzsche and a mere eight kilometres from Buchenwald.

No book about the craft of writing seems complete without a stern chapter on the importance of eschewing adverbs and adjectives - but what to put in their place?