91É«ÇéƬ

What’s happened? Suddenly, engineers are suave and engineering is trendy – hardly an a par with the fashionable passion for football these days, but close. The BBC must take much ofthe blame, of course, launching a television series in the busy autumn schedules that looks at same of the most breathtaking engineering projects around. Didn’t the corporation realise that it might just catch on? Yes it did, and about time, too. And now there’s a book of the series, summarised as “long, deep, big, tall, fast and far”. The Limit: Engineering on the Boundaries of Science by Mike Dash (BBC Books, £17.99, ISBN 0 563 37117 X), will be compulsive reading for bright young things everywhere, darling.