Consider your mobile phone. Before it was assembled in a Chinese factory, the coltan in its capacitors may have been dug by miners in the Eastern Congo, where millions have died in a series of wars over ‘conflict minerals’, though we give this no more thought than previous generations of Westerners gave to the Congolese origins of the ivory in their piano keys, the rubber in their tyres, the copper in their bullet casings or the uranium in their bombs.

At that time, the steam-traffic on the Thames was far below its present extent, and watermen’s boats were far more numerous. […] Early as it was, there were plenty of scullers going here and there that morning, and plenty of barges dropping down with the tide […]

" […] He clashes with readerdom because he is his own ideal reader and those other readers are so very often mere lip- moving ghosts and amnesiacs” […]

Smal bodies, of Atoms, out of whose various combinations bigger molleculæ are made.