The idea that small and simple things can be big and complex things in disguise is one that’s fascinated novelists for centuries. In Jane Austen’s world, for example, the merest of imagined slights can have the most far-reaching and dramatic of outcomes, leaving us wondering just how crucial the minutiae of manners can be in constructing a wider social context.
It is this notion that forms the core of Roma Agrawal’s non-fictional examination of the engineering fundamentals behind the physical world we live in today. In ‘Nuts and Bolts’ (Hachette, £22, ISBN 9781529340075), Agrawal’s Seven Wonders of the Ancient World aren’t grand constructions, but the humble nail, wheel, spring, magnet, lens, string and pump. Perhaps not so humble after all.
As frameworks for expressing the central ubiquity of engineering in our everyday life go, ‘Nuts and Bolts’ hits the nail on the head. And so it is fitting that Agrawal’s first subject should be what, on the surface...