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War is terrible, but the causes of war are sometimes laughably trivial. Central America seems to have a special knack for silly casus belli. In 1969, El Salvador and Honduras fought a four-day conflict popularly called the Football War, after the contested soccer games that lit the fuse of ongoing ...

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Geography was my favourite subject in school; physics the one I disliked the most. If only I’d known about this Map of Physics!   This spatial representation of the subject, dating from 1939, defines itself as Being a map of physics, containing a brief historical outline of the subject as will ...

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There are many ways to look at Europe other than as a collection of nation-states. Plenty of other imagined communities lurk beneath the surface of the standard political map. Check out the continent's alcohol belts [1], have a look at its core and periphery [2], or inspect the languages in which ...

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Maybe it’s because the country’s shape tends towards a square, but Poland’s borders give it a solid, anchored appearance on the map of Europe. And yet those borders are relatively new; few other countries, if any, have expanded, contracted and generally moved around on the map quite as erratically ...

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A failed experiment in speed: while I was rushing down into the basement without flicking on the light, the door closed before I had reached the downstairs switch. Frantically searching and failing to find it, I was rendered helpless by the dread of pitch darkness enveloping me. That part of my ...

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