MATTHEW HAWKINS applauds a psychotherapist’s disection of William Blake
The importance of optimism
WILL PODMORE is enlightened by the achievements of a 17th century scientist whose work anticipates computer programming as well as Marx’s materialism
MECHANICAL SHORTCUTS TO FUTURE: The Stepped Reckoner, a mechanical calculator invented by German mathematician Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz in 1674 and completed in 1694. About 67 cm this was the first calculating machine able to do all four arithmetic operations: addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division
[Hermann Julius Meyer/Public domain; Gottfried Leibniz (c1695) by Christoph Bernhard Francke] 
New releases from Christina Alden and Alex Patterson, Odette Michell, Clementine Lovell
JOHN GREEN is fascinated by a very readable account of Britain’s involvement in South America
Strip cartoons used to be the bread and butter of newspapers and they have been around for centuries. MICHAL BONCZA asks our own Paul Tanner about which bees are in his bonnet
GORDON PARSONS acknowledges the authority with which Sarah Kane’s theatrical justification for suicide has resonance today
RON JACOBS welcomes a timely homage to one of the IWW and CPUSA’s most effective orators
The Best of all Possible Worlds: A Life of Leibniz in Seven Pivotal Days
Michael Kempe, Pushkin Press, £20
MICHAEL KEMPE, director of the Leibniz Archive in Hanover, has written an enthralling biography of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. It is not a conventional biography. Instead Kempe presents a series of snapshots of significant days in Leibniz’s life, vivid pictures of how he lived and worked in Paris, Zellerfeld, Hanover, Berlin and Vienna.
Leibniz was one of the last representatives of a type of universal scientist, with the 17th century scientific revolution’s optimistic trust in progress, and also with the hope, dating back to the Renaissance, of being able to lay claim to all the world’s knowledge. In his amazingly productive life, Leibniz indeed made major contributions across a huge range of disciplines.
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