'It's rare for a book to make you see the world differently, but this ... does exactly that on almost every page' GuardianStandard histories of technology give tired accounts of the usual inventions, inventors, and dates, framing technology as the inevitable march of progress. They split history into ages - electrification, motorisation, and computerisation - and rarely ask whether anyone bothered to use these inventions at the time.

Shock of the Old is not one of those histories. I Letters e...