The first purpose-built business computer came not from a bank or a ministry but from the people who made Britain's cakes. Hackaday rightly suspects there's a cultural essay in that. The picture of tea-shop logistics driving electronic computing is the delight here, and very British with it.

Macabre, but of the calmly fascinating sort: a civic infrastructure problem that happens to involve corpses. City growth met the fixed capacity of the churchyard, and medical schools were a ready market for the surplus. Roger Luckhurst makes the sanitation reformers nearly as interesting as the body snatchers.

Undergraduates mocking their teachers in rhyme is an ancient tradition, but few get the double honour of being suppressed and then preserved by a librarian. The quatrain on the Master, Jowett, became famous well beyond the college. Ideal idle reading, and short enough for one coffee.