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“... specimens enable the visitor to confirm, extend and perhaps challenge the work of a Winckelmann, a Darwin or a Burckhardt. There would be little point in defending them as places where the rare or obscure can be rediscovered in private and where anyone, however poor, can speculate and meditate in peace. They have to present themselves as exciting places to ...”

“... neighbour Uvedale Price, Sir William Hamilton, Britain’s ambassador at Naples, and the collector Charles Townley. By the mid-l780s Knight moved in the liberal, not to say liberated Whig circles that had Charles James Fox as a hero, and ancient Athens as an inspiration. Knight’s first literary attempt was to describe a ...”

“... days – les trois glorieuses – at the end of July 1830, Paris was in turmoil. The attempt by Charles X and his ultra-royalist first minister, the Prince de Polignac, to stamp out liberal discontent with a set of repressive ordinances had backfired. By 28 July, insurgents had raised barricades, taken the Hôtel de Ville, and driven royalist troops out of ...”

“... lived at all, their bones having been placed in rocks by the Creator as a test of faith? In 1830, Charles Lyell’s Principles of Geology had argued that the Earth was much older than the six thousand or so years suggested by scripture, and in 1859 Darwin’s On the Origin of Species promoted a new theory that scandalously ...”

“... Manby Gully made quick fortunes, though Gully was eventually disgraced by his involvement in the Charles Bravo murder mystery. Hembry records that those who undertook the cold-water cure at Malvern included Gladstone (a glutton for self-discipline), Macaulay, Dickens, Tennyson, Carlyle, Darwin and Florence Nightingale, but ...”

“... literature. Another significantly missing figure in this account of the Victorian mentality is Darwin, who might have been used to make sense of it. To Hopkins the Jesuit priest, the natural world still blazed with the grandeur of God. The trouble with the weather for Ruskin and many of his contemporaries was that it didn’t. Ever since ...”

“... finding totally new felicities as well as confirming old ones. But let us raise the hat again to Charles Fletcher who, the 1953 Preface tells us, supplied the first, 1941, book with all its selections from Shakespeare, Milton, Pope, Tennyson and Dryden. Of course the quarter-century gap between the second and third editions has brought in new names. Four ...”

“... the human-animal distinction. Most people accept that human beings are animals and, following Darwin, many natural and social scientists are increasingly drawn to thinking about human cognitive and emotional behaviour in terms of our pre-human, or proto-human, evolutionary ancestors. But animals are not as pertinent to modern human experience as they once ...”

“... there are at least 1.8 million named species, and many more unknown. But what is a species? Since Darwin, biologists have caricatured Linnaeus as the arch-defender of the fixity of species. It is true that in his earlier works Linnaeus stated that God had created a fixed number of species; seeming novelties, such as the striped tulips that had fetched such ...”

“... it would be fun to sign the visitors’ book, is unknowable. The big fish Brewer catches is Charles Babbage, who came in 1828. Despite being on what was supposed to be a rest cure, he and a friend had themselves lowered on ropes into the crater. Their guide, the resilient Madonna, declined to join them. But all Babbage appears to have written in the ...”

“... Sir William Boyd Dawkins, not a direct ancestor, if ancestor at all, of the present carrier of the Darwin meme – before Johnson has recovered from his spiritual despond. In a twinkling he has reconciled God and Darwin. Thereafter his magnificent self-confidence never flags, his melodious voice booms on, wowing sympathetic ...”

“... intolerable, unstoppable and, in war at least, indispensable. He was bred to it. His father, Sir Charles Jackson, was a Monmouthshire architect-developer, lawyer and politician who, among other things, built up a large collection of silver which virtually is the National Museum of Wales’s collection and bought shares in a then obscure Sunday newspaper ...”

“... of this class. The scribblers and men of ideas do reasonably well, at least in the later period: Darwin but not Newton, for instance, W.T. Stead but not Jonathan Swift. The system of cross-reference goes a long way in both remedying and explaining some disparities of treatment. It means that the reader whose thirst for knowledge is not slaked by the entry ...”

“... palaeontology and the structural relationships between species – had been transformed by Darwin, with Owen not necessarily an opponent but virtually an onlooker. Unable to keep out of the fray, he cast himself as an opponent, to some extent allowing a misguided version of his own position to become current, so that, in Darwinian eyes, he was the ...”

“... of the self. This was a convenient as well as a sincerely held conviction, since in the wake of Darwin, finding God in the material world was becoming something of a problem. Militant atheists today regard religious faith as a question of subscribing to certain propositions about the world. Newman countered this theological ignorance, pervasive in his own ...”