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Sam Leith

The Einstein of maths

The odds are that the name Alexandre Grothendieck will mean little or nothing to most Spectator readers. It’s a name I heard for the first time in high summer two years or so ago, not long, as I remember it, after the film A Beautiful Mind had come out. I was in the garden of

What’s morality got to do with it?

Every generation lives a little longer than the last — it’s the sign of an advancing society. A hundred years ago the average British life expectancy at birth was 45. Now it is 75, giving us a blissful free decade at the end of our working lives to spend fending off great-grandchildren and watching wide-screen