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“... between the mechanists and a diminishing group of vitalists rattled on through the 19th century. Darwin’s theory of natural selection put paid to any remaining belief in the immutability of species. His was a thoroughly materialist explanation of evolution based on three simple propositions: like begets like, with minor differences; all creatures produce ...”

“... hell itself, filled with writhing beasts that rend at one another as fires destroy the earth. In John Martin’s The Country of The Iguanodon (1837), a group of dragon-like reptiles slither and bite; in A. Demarly’s apocalyptic Eruptions of Poisonous Hot Springs in the Triassic Period (1883) a geyser of toxic gas spurts from a volcanic vent, while dead ...”

“... of the computer. The true rulers of Britain are ‘merit Lords’ appointed for life: Lord Darwin, Lord Bentham, Lord Brunel and above all Lord Babbage. Charles Babbage really lived, of course (though not as a Lord), and really invented merit lordship, the computer, and many other improvements in mechanism. All one needs to accept, to set this novel ...”

“... the pre-Socratics, whose work was just being edited, in a history of philosophy that also included Darwin and Hegel. He combined the latest discoveries of ‘scientific’ archaeology with Winckelmann’s repertoire of celebrated ancient sculptures. His account of the French Renaissance benefited from the pioneering work of his friend Emilia Pattison, whose ...”

“... a word of 1) to 3) either; in particular, I don’t believe 2). Why I don’t is explained in What Darwin Got Wrong, which I wrote with Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini, a book which, unsurprisingly, is not in good odour among doctrinaire Darwinists.* A word about ‘massive modularity’ and we can then turn to Kurzban’s arguments and why they strike me as ...”

“... no mass-production car has ever cut the air more efficiently. Twelve of the 24 cars which left Darwin for Adelaide on 1 November 1987 failed to complete the 2000-mile course, and the MacCready-GM Sunraycer won with spectacular ease, at an average speed of 41.6 mph. ‘The attention that a solar car race focuses on doing big jobs with little ...”

“... up to regard the Washington political stage as his natural domain – his great-grandfather John Adams was the first president to live in the White House; his grandfather was John Quincy Adams – and he could never keep away from the city and its gossip for long. But his early political heroes soon revealed feet of ...”

“... they face. While in Wives of Fame Edna Healey claims that Mary Livingstone, Jenny Marx and Emma Darwin ‘deserve to be brought out of the shadows’, she ensures by her choice of title that our interest is aroused precisely through their famous husbands. Peters, with refreshing frankness, entitles his book Red Jenny: A Life with Karl Marx, thus ...”

“... William Beckford, William Blake (as an illustrator), S.T. Coleridge, William Cowper, Erasmus Darwin, Humphry Davy, Maria Edgeworth, Olaudah Equiano, Benjamin Franklin, Henry Fuseli, William Godwin, Mary Hays, William Hazlitt, Thomas Malthus, Thomas Paine, Richard Price, Joseph Priestley, Charlotte Smith, John Horne ...”

“... for a more discriminating understanding of the texts. Both taught and published in America. John Unrau and Jeanne Clegg have enabled us to see Ruskin’s relations with Venice in a new light: one works in Canada, the other in Italy. Important collections of correspondence (Bradley’s editions of the letters from Venice and the Cowper-Temple ...”

“... There’s a revealing slip near the start of John Banville’s new novel. Ursula Godley, whose husband lies dying upstairs, reflects on her son and daughter: ‘These are the creatures she carried inside her and gave birth to and fed from her own breast, phoenix-like.’ A phoenix can never feed its young because there is only ever one of it at a time ...”

“... Only A Vindication of the Rights of Woman could be readily bought, in an Everyman, bound up with John Stuart Mill’s On the Subjection of Women. In a second-hand shop I found a 1906 edition of her Original Stories (for children), with an introduction by E.V. Lucas and five of the Blake plates reproduced. The other modern edition I acquired was called The ...”

“... think of asking the question. And it turns out that sex is a very big problem for biologists, as John Maynard Smith explains in one of the most readable essays of this book, an essay that he has simply entitled, ‘Why sex?’. Maynard Smith is an emeritus professor of biology at the University of Sussex and the foremost theoretical biologist in ...”

“... paupers in the country would long ago have been under my management.’ Himmelfarb’s studies of Darwin, Disraeli, Bentham and Blackstone may be read primarily as essays in historical revisionism: though all have implications for wider moral theory, it would be possible to view them as merely academic. A less clinical and more contentious note is struck by ...”

“... wars, the eruption of 1794 was, at least from a cartoonist’s point of view, fortuitous.John Brewer’s large and somewhat rambling survey of the cultural significance of Vesuvius begins with an attempt to draw a single thread from this tangled story. He starts with a visitors’ book, now in the Harvard library, which covers the period from ...”