Flat Earth: The History of an Infamous Idea
by Christine Garwood
Macmillan ₤20, 400 pages
FT bookshop price: ₤16

Flat-earthers are round (if they will forgive the word) the bend. As Christine Garwood points out in her wonderful Flat Earth, it wasn’t Columbus’s Atlantic expedition which made people realise the world was spherical. Pythagoras and his school are credited as the first to make this observation in the 6th century BC. Aristotle may have thought that the earth was at the centre of the universe but he at least came up with proof that it was curved: the hull of a ship on the horizon sinks out of sight before the mast. So when ”Parallax”, one of the aliases used by snake-oil salesman Samuel Rowbotham, began to propound his flat-earth ideas in the 19th century, he was pushing back the clock by a good two millennia.