I’m a New Zealand writer with over thirty years hands-on professional experience as a published author and in publishing. My main interests are in the sciences – physics, particularly, though I’m deeply curious about a lot of stuff, especially the human condition. I have qualifications in writing, music and anthropology among other fields, and hold multiple post-graduate degrees in history. I’m also a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society at University College, London. However, I don’t define myself as a historian and prefer not to be labelled as one. History is but one of the things I do. What’s more important to me is understanding people, whose story is told by history and by science, sociology and philosophy – aspects of which I learned post-grad under a former student of both Karl Popper and Ludwig Wittgenstein. Did I mention I also like science fiction? And fantasy? I’m a huge Tolkien fan. I write a lot – fiction (mostly fantasy and science-fiction) and non-fiction (well, yes, it’s mostly history, but I’ve done science and engineering too). My published writing, sold on merit, includes over 550 articles, academic papers, reviews, novellas and short stories, and over 50 books on topics ranging from travel guides to biography, engineering, military and social history. I’ve been published principally by Penguin Random House.
I am always intrigued with people, particularly the way they can show different aspects of themselves. A while back I was discussing the local writing field with somebody and a third person’s name came up. ‘He’s a really nice guy,’ my friend said. I begged to differ: I knew him only as a stranger who’d … More How we all see different aspects of the same people
This week’s obscure English word is cabotage. It means to ship goods or sail between two points in the same country. Your challenge: write a sentence or two in the comments using this word. Copyright © Matthew Wright 2019
I woke this morning to news that Notre Dame cathedral was afire. It shocked me; this is one of the world’s great buildings of all time. I’m glad the French were able to save at least part of the structure. The story took me back a dozen years to the day when my wife and … More Notre Dame cathedral before the fire
I was intrigued by reports last week on the discovery of a previously unknown extinct human species, Homo luzonensis, in a cave in the Phillipines. It’s the fourth new human species – genus Homo – discovered in the past twenty years. All are extinct, and much clearly remains to be revealed, but it’s nonetheless clear … More Another species of human discovered – and what it means for us
It’s been a hot week for science. Thanks to the Event Horizon Telescope, an algorithm created by 29-year old PhD graduate Katie Bouman, and a lot of hard work, humanity got its first photo of a black hole – M87 in the galaxy Messier 87, some 55 million light-years away. It wasn’t made with visible … More The science behind the awesome black hole photograph
This week’s obscure English word is larboard. It’s another term for the port side of a ship, often used, as far as I can tell, in the US Midwest riverboats during the nineteenth century (another term was ‘mark twain’, a reference to the number of knots on a rope used to plumb the river for … More The obscure word of the week is larboard, Mr Clemens
English is a wonderful language that never ceases to surprise with its ability to evolve with society, to change and twirl through usage. It happens right before our eyes, in an astonishingly short time. And I don’t just mean the way that the noun ‘invitation’ has been supplanted by its verb form (‘to invite’), creating … More I’m woke to the gerundification of English
