A fascinating podcast from Malcolm Gladwell, from his Revisionist History series, puts the human cause of a massive famine in Bengal in 1943 down to the relationship between Churchill and Frederick Lindemann, his highly eccentric chief scientist. I don’t have any interest in wartime Bengal but Lindemann, later often called Cherwell (as in Lord Cherwell) plays a cameo role in Britain’s big push into nuclear power in 1955. And Gladwell has unearthed many juicy recollections about Lindemann, including from a C.P. Snow public talk in 1960 (which, by the way, sounds like it was fascinating). It’s amazing how new sources of data keep springing up.