The Stanford Prison Experiment was conducted in August 1971 under the direction of Professor Philip Zimbardo. It became famous, or notorious, because it seemed to prove that behaviour was situational rather than dispositional, a matter of environment and assigned role…

During the 1740s and ‘50s, the Mannheim court orchestra received numerous accolades. It comprised 50-55 top-quality performers from all over Europe, and under the inspired direction of Jan Stamic (Johann Stamitz) it elicited intense emotion from its audiences. For instance,…

Imagine a person wandering into a foreign capital city and shooting innocent bystanders or setting off an explosion while yelling something about God’s will and insisting that his actions (oh, yes, almost certainly his not hers ­– this would be…

Having spent most of December clearing a backlog of demands and preparing for Christmas, I told all my regular customers that I’d be doing no editing work between the 21st of the month and the New Year. I was as…