Contrary to popular belief, fostered in countless classrooms across the world, Christopher Columbus was not the first to discover that the earth was round. The idea of a spherical world had been widely accepted in educated circles from as early as the fourth century BC. Yet, bizarrely, it was not until the supposedly more rational nineteenth century that the notion of a flat earth really took hold. Meticulously researched and compellingly readable, Christine Garwood provides the first definitive account of this 'infamous idea'. She explodes the myths surrounding Columbus and the battles between science and religion, explores the wilder shores of flat-earth belief and establishes, without doubt, that the world is most emphatically not flat.
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