DESPITE WHAT COMMENTATORS as diverse as Ira Gershwin and Barack Obama would have you believe, Christopher Columbus did not discover that the world was round. That honour goes to Aristotle, who in about 330BC first postulated a globe-shaped earth at the centre of a spherical universe. James Hannam’s The Globe takes us on a whirlwind 2,000-year tour d’horizon of how the counter-intuitive theory of a round world became accepted as scientific fact.
Hannam takes us first
