Held’s book does exactly what it says on the cover. He explains the subjective experience and mechanism of eclipses, and the best ways of observing them. There are clear maps, global and local, showing the path of each eclipse with tables of exact times for specific locations. Also included are literary accounts of solar eclipses by William Wordsworth (1820), Adalbert Stifter (1842), and M Wilhelm Meyer (1905). The book comes with a handy pair of silver foil spectacles for eclipse-viewing.

The next total solar eclipse is on 1 August 2008, but you’d have to endure the icy wastes of north-east Canada, northern Greenland, Mongolia or northern China to experience totality.

A better bet is the one on 22 July 2009, viewable in totality from India, Nepal, Bangladesh, Bhutan, China and east across the Pacific. I would be tempted to see it from Varanasi (Benares) in Uttar Pradesh, with its magical waterfront, but there is only a 10 per cent probability of a clear sky here at the height of summer, so a better bet would be Rawannawi in the Gilbert Islands, Kiribati, between 2.44pm and 5.02pm local time. Or Easter Island on 11 July 2010? You’d get more than four minutes of totality after lunch.