In How the World is Made, his final book, John Michell sums up and lays out for anyone to follow, his many astonishing (re)discoveries of the way numbers, geometry and patterns work and how they underlie our whole world and the best of the well-ordered societies and states that have flourished since ancient times.

Step by step from first principles the reader is taken through each of the numbers from 1 to 12, the geometrical figures and regular shapes they generate, their meetings, matings and the ways they breed. En route the reader learns to understand how number and sacred geometry underpin, link and illuminate traditions and cultures ranging from ancient Egypt to Christianity, constructions from the Great Pyramid and Stonehenge through to the crop circles of our new millennium, localities real and envisioned from Plato's Atlantis to St John the Divine's Heavenly City of Revelation.

This is the summation of a lifetime's research on the part of John Michell, wondrously illustrated with his own beautiful watercolour diagrams as well as Allan Brown's computer-drawn figures that clearly and precisely, yet with sensitivity and 'heart', delineate details of construction and much else to help our understanding of 'that pattern in the heavens', as Socrates called it, 'which anyone can find and establish within themselves'.