by Ian Campbell
N.b. When we published Geneset in 1994 it retailed at £25. Now, you can find copies on Amazon or Ebay for a fraction of that price.
Poussin's Secret was published shortly after Geneset. It is about the geometry contained in Poussin's most famous work les bergers d'arcadie and was published separately because we didn't have enough space to include it in Geneset. Henry Lincoln had the painting x-rayed by the Louvre gallery in Paris because he suspected that there might be clues as to the painting's construction. He commissioned art historian Professor Christopher Cornford to make the examination and his conclusion was that the painting was constructed using 'pentagonal geometry'. This means that there are a lot of straight lines involved, connected by a 36° angle… the angle you get on the 'star' points of a regular pentagram.
When Lincoln made his series for the BBC he took cameras to the roadside tomb which had more than a passing similarity to the tomb featured in the Poussin painting. He identified the view point from which the painting had been made and set up two cameras. One camera was used to show the painting and the other was used to display the actual landscape from the painting's perspective. This idea showed that approximately half of the painting's landscape background was almost identical to the actual landscape as seen from that position. However, when the landscape camera zoomed in to a detail it turned through 90° to the left and zoomed in on the wrong features in the wrong valley. David Wood noticed this error during the broadcast of the BBC program and asked Henry Lincoln 'why?' Lincoln was unaware of the error up to the point where DW replayed the episode on his video recorder. This slight slip eventually led DW to his discovery of the 'Circle of Churches' and the writing of Genisis & Geneset.
Vendange is a series of reminiscences of working at a château during the wine harvesting season for several years. The tales are humorous and informative and made at the time when the French wine industry changed from its mediaeval methods to a modernised industry. On my first vendange in the Haut Médoc region just north of Bordeaux. I had an invitation to visit a very important deuxième crus château. I had dinner with the people who ran the place and they explained how the vendange worked at their château. They employed 350 itinerant Spanish vendangeurs who followed the wine season from Spain into France and finished working in the Swiss vineyards in December. The year was 1979 and it was the last time the château ran under its medieval system.
The following year I returned to the great château and was surprised to find that the 350 Spanish vemdangeurs had been replaced by 6 men and three gigantic machines. The change was rapid and final. It was if not the 'beginning of the end' then certainly 'the end of the beginning' of wine making in the Haut Médoc. Of course, the purists will tell you that the wine made by machine is inferior to that made by hand and they would be right but very few people would be able to tell the difference. The Great Premier Grands Crus still pick by hand and the smaller sub 14 hectares vineyards probably still pick the same way but the vast majority of wine is picked by machine.
I went to work in the vineyards to learn about wine and how it was made. I learned a lot about the process and witnessed the changes from hand-picking to machine cropping. Vendange relates the fun I had making the vendange several years running and the information I gleaned from so doing.
How To Do Fractions
I am what is commonly referred to as a 'late starter' and by this, I mean that I have spent my life doing things far differently than what is considered 'usual'. I turned down the chance of a university education when I left school, but seized on the opportunity three decades later where I read Astrophysics for three years. I needed a job and there is little need for astrophysicists in my home county of Kent. So armed with my degree, I trained to be a Math teacher.
When I started teaching, I was appalled to find that we were producing students who at sixteen years of age could not do what my generation had done at the age of seven. This was not because my generation were super capable. In fact, in the East End of London where I was raised, its schools lie at the very bottom of the League Tables. There had to be other reasons and I found some of them. Let's look at 'How to Do Fractions'. We are told about 'numerators' and 'denominators', 'lowest common multiples' and other intimidating terms which children don't understand. They get put off or frightened by such terms and there has to be an easier way of teaching the topic. There is and I wish I could claim the idea as my own but I can't. How To Do Fractions teaches a method which uses no 'difficult to understand words'. It is an incredibly simple method and one with which I can teach the average student everything they need to know about fractions in half an hour. Take a look inside the book and decide for yourself. If you want to understand how to add, subtract, multiply and divide fractions then this will teach you in double quick time.