ENQUIRE WITHIN UPON EVERYTHING
by Prof. Anthony Finkelstein

As a child in I fell in love with a book, or more accurately a set of books, called ‘Enquire Within’. When I read them they were already dated, and I think I realised that, as I lay sprawled on the carpet at my Grandmother's house on quiet Sunday afternoons. The red-covered books were successors to the famous Victorian 'how to' book "Enquire Within upon Everything". They attempted to answer, for the curious child, such questions as "Where is Tierra del Fuego", "What is Beating the Bounds?", "Who was Lord Gladstone?". There was no obvious organisational principle, so information discovery was serendipitous. The answers were put with the assurance typical of their period and with an imperial confidence in the rightness of all things British that, looking back from the vantage of the year 2002, is hard to credit. Interestingly, Tim Berners-Lee the 'inventor of the Web' called his early web prototype ‘Enquire Within’ in homage to his childhood fascination with the same books.