“Science!” The famous exclamation from Thomas Dolby’s immortal pop hit from his 1982 “She Blinded Me With Science” (also covered to noteworthy effect by William Shatner in 2011) with which I startle my family and friends each time the subject is mentioned and I’m feeling a bit jocular.

So was it most recently exclaimed when I opened the recently-arrived package from Oxford University Press containing a fresh copy of The Oxford Illustrated History of Science. Edited by Iwan Rhys Morus, Professor of History at Aberystwyth University, and containing his own work as well as that of twelve other internationally noted scholars, this is indeed a book that promises to delight as well as inform.