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“... these units in order to explain by their combinations the phenomena of the living world.’ Even Darwin hypothesised the existence of elemental units of heredity, which he called ‘gemmules’. August Weisman, one of the greatest zoologists of the late 19th century, took things much further by speculating that the elements of heredity were stored in the ...”

“... of Pliny’s speech in praise of Trajan (the Panegyric) and some commentary on the Gospel of St John. But the prize finds, making up the largest part of the book, were faintly legible copies of the correspondence of Marcus Cornelius Fronto, one of the leading scholars and orators of the second century ad, and tutor to the future emperor Marcus Aurelius, who ...”

“... standard pattern, he acquired a well-deserved fame as a moral philosopher and academic reformer. John Maynard Keynes’s jibe – ‘He never did anything but wonder whether Christianity was true and prove that it wasn’t and hope that it was’ – did scant justice to the seriousness of his purpose as he searched for the missing keystone in a universal ...”

“... seem on the point of speech. No woman in a portrait has been as impatient to interrupt as Erasmus Darwin tapping his finger on the table (in the painting by Wright of Derby), or Bertin gripping his knees (in the painting by Ingres). Women, instead, are good listeners, leaning forward, head slightly tilted, one hand playing about the chin or ear, a slight ...”

“... to be conquered, to be killed. Kill, or be killed. Modern commercial culture has extrapolated from Darwin – and rather unfairly attributed to him – the social myth of ‘survival of the fittest’. I am supplementing Warner in pointing out how strongly this figures in most modern bestiaries (often known as television nature programmes), in which images of ...”

“... First was the discovery of a genuinely effective drug for controlling mania. The Australian John Cade found that lithium really helped, and after a lot of scepticism (and many unwitting overdoses) the Federal Drug Administration approved its use in 1970; in 1974 it was approved for the treatment of manic depression. Before that, there was really no ...”

“... about physics and a private detective with an eccentric JFK assassination conspiracy theory. John Sheddan, a lowlife of Bobby’s long acquaintance who forges prescriptions and deals drugs, puts it to Bobby that they have something in common: I know that you think we’re very different, me and thee. My father was a country storekeeper and yours a ...”

“... men seem to take second billing to the wall where the giants of Victorian science are gathered – Darwin, Huxley and Lyall, each whiskered too but each with an unmistakable half-smile playing about his lips. There’s not much doubt which is the winning side. Nowhere on either wall is space found for Walter Bagehot (1826-77). Yet G.M. Young, that hallowed ...”

“... necessary for the mental than for the physical procreative act.’ Would the same apply to Newton, Darwin and Einstein, we begin to ask ourselves, as the great man steps down from the rostrum and, looking out of the window, affects to soliloquise, smiling whimsically at his own capacity to extend the length of his sentences. ‘And in the state of permanent ...”

“... From the lips of the gendarme fell the names of great men, men of genius . . . Marx, Maudsley, Darwin and, finally, Lombroso. He cited the latter to affirm the truth that everyone is possessed by madness. Pipes notes his fascination with detective fiction, and cites the opinion of other tsarist functionaries that, for Sudeikin, ‘the war with the ...”

“... hellfire – ‘yikes’, as Nomi says when this choice confronts her. Tash, who likes sex and John Lennon and string bikini underwear, is clearly hell-bound, despite her little sister’s fervent prayers on her behalf. Nomi too has a Dionysian streak, but her every hedonistic impulse is accompanied by the sharpening of diabolic knives. Nomi’s East ...”

“... will crumble and where the new frontiers will coalesce. Medawar’s ‘genius’, his colleague John Maynard Smith told me, ‘was a bit unexpected. He had a genius for thinking of the right experiment which I enormously envy. I don’t have it myself: I never think of the right experiment. If I do an experiment at all, it’s usually the wrong one. Nor did ...”

“... he visited Ruskin’s house and saw his paintings, and later, went with the Nortons to see Charles Darwin (Charles Eliot Norton’s sister-in-law, Sara Sedgwick, would later marry Darwin’s son). ‘Darwin,’ he wrote to his father, ‘is the sweetest, simplest, gentlest old ...”

“... exemplify, in Trevelyan’s phrase, ‘Agnosticism wedded to Faith’. Meredith, who had absorbed Darwin in his own way, was thoroughly au courant with all the disenchanting tendencies of the age, but yet he managed to offer something like the old-style consolations modernity had threatened to snatch away. Trevelyan’s admiration has the feel of someone ...”

“... Susan Sontag wrote, ‘in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick.’ John Donne believed that illness is the kingdom, that it steals in and corrupts our lives: ‘The disease hath established a Kingdome, an Empire in mee, and will have certaine Arcana Imperii, secrets of State, by which it will proceed.’ Both perspectives are ...”