One thing I didn’t anticipate when I decided to look at the role played by a railway in Atlas Shrugged was that only a few weeks later the UK would be facing something of a rail crisis of its own. But at least our rail companies have not taken the Ayn Rand option, and blamed the passengers.
Historically, women have always had a hard time breaking into science but two women, both sisters of astronomers but separated in time by 150 years, did manage it.
The past few weeks have not been good ones for rail travel, and train crash and the reasons for it is also one of the main events in Atlas Shrugged.
When Rose de Freycinet visited Sydney, and despite having been robbed almost as soon as she set foot in the town, she saw advantages in the British method of founding a colony.
In 2020 the Geological Survey of Australia’s Northern Territory had published a full-colour magnetic map of the whole of their area, with accompanying grids. For me, a trip into the days of my youth, because in mid-1964 I was party chief of a team flying part of a feature centred on Tennant Creek that had come to be known as the ‘Aeromagnetic Ridge’.
In the published French editions of Rose de Freycinet’s journal there is a gap between the arrival of the Uranie off the coast of New South Wales and the 27th of November, more than a week after she anchored in Neutral Bay. Was that week devoid of incident? Absolutely not.