A core principle of modern science holds that a scientific explanation must not attribute will or agency to natural phenomena. "The Restless Clock" examines the

A “wide-ranging, witty, and astonishingly learned” scientific and cultural history of the concept of the capacity to act in nature (London Review of Books).

Empiricism today implies the dispassionate scrutiny of facts. But Jessica Riskin finds that in the French Enlightenment, empiricism was intimately bound up with

It is 1939. Eva Delectorskaya is a beautiful 28-year-old Russian émigrée living in Paris. As war breaks out she is recruited for the British Secret Service by

The Restless City: A Short History of New York from Colonial Times to the Present is a short, lively history of the world’s most exciting and diverse metropol