In early modern Britain, belief in prophecies, omens, ghosts, apparitions and fairies was commonplace. Among both educated and ordinary people the absolute existence of a spiritual world was taken for granted. Yet in the eighteenth century such certa...

Robert Boyle ranks with Newton and Einstein as one of the world's most important scientists. Aristocrat and natural philosopher, he was a remarkably wide-ranging and penetrating thinker – pioneering the modern experimental method, championing a novel...