Rivalry is a key feature of scientific endeavour. This is an examination of eight instances in the history of science and technology that changed the world. They all illustrate various forms of rivalry - between individuals, institutions, even nations - and to what extent it played a pivotal role.

White's thesis is that the greatest advances in science come about through the stress of rivalry, whether between individual scientists, groups of scientists, institutions or even international communities of scientists. Not in this book do we have the thunderbolt of divine inspiration, or the placid, sterile and rather dull world in which it is popularly imagined the scientist lives: for White, great scientific advancements often find their origin and progression into the wider world through the very human battles for supremacy among the experts in any particular field, battles which can be born of jealousy, pettiness and simple personality clashes, as well as more noble instincts. The book deals with eight instances in the history of science and technology which changed the world, all of which have acute rivalry at their heart: Newton and Leibniz, Lavoisier and Priestley, Darwin and Wallace, Edison and Tesla, the race for the Atom Bomb, Crick and Watson, the Space Race and Gates and Ellison.

First English translation of a classic gothic novel

The nineteenth-century novelist, George Sand, is most famous today for her tumultuous love life and trouser-wearing days in Paris, but she achieved major commercial and critical success in her day and has gradually made her way back into the literary canon. Mainly known for her pastoral tales and allegedly simplistic idealism, Sand in fact produced around ninety novels which experiment with a wide range of themes, forms and aesthetic models. This book offers thefirst study of vision in Sand's works. It argues that, rather than rejecting reality in favour of the ideal, Sand integrates physical observation with internal forms of seeing such as the imaginationand visionary insights. The study maintains that Sand's understanding of vision provides the basis for her distinctive style and challenges conventional categorisations of the novel in this period.