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“... but leaving Britain in darkness. In Reflections on the Decline of Science in England (1830), Charles Babbage argued that the problem was deep and systemic: a professional revolution was required to place science at the helm of the national economy. In France the sciences led to well-paid and prestigious careers; in Britain their practitioners were for ...”

“... Jubilee Galleries (worth it, in my opinion, for the effigy of Nelson and another from 1686 of Charles II in one of his own outfits). This makes it, by my reckoning, the world’s most expensive church, rivalled only by Barcelona’s Sagrada Familia, which charges €26 – though there the money goes to actually finishing the cathedral. St Paul’s is a ...”

“... England. Kevles underestimates the dark side of the scientific project to determine, from Darwin onwards, the selection for, or against, human subjects as worthy of scientific approval or dismissal: the irony of the human sciences is that human beings have waged war against each other in their name and that some people have been victims of those ...”

“... contributions of the ‘Cambridge Network’ – men like William Whewell, Adam Sedgwick, Charles Babbage, George Airy, John Herschel and John Henslow. Some half-dozen pieces on the Cambridge Apostles, not the oldest but certainly the longest-lived of student secret societies, have made readers familiar with a whole generation of Cantabridgians, of ...”

“... is true for other well-documented groups, such as the royal families of Europe. Francis Galton, Charles Darwin’s cousin and the father of human genetics, pointed out why. Each generation, there is a chance that any family will have no sons, and their name will die out. Once lost, it is gone for ever and will be replaced by an existing name. In ...”

“... the early 19th century but was given a rough reception, not least by Cuvier. In 1833, Philippe-Charles Schmerling found, buried deep in the floor of a cave in Belgium, what he took to be two human skulls, close to a mammoth tooth and intermixed with stone artefacts and the bones of extinct animals. His case was rejected even by such distinguished ...”

“... modernity of contemporary England and the apostasy of its people from the Anglican faith of Charles I and Archbishop Laud. Given the chance, he would restore in modern dress the divine right of kings and the doctrinal authority of a state church preaching supernatural Christianity. Wright and Cowling have much in common in their alienation from society ...”

“... In 1853 the Reverend Frederick Morris, an opponent of Charles Darwin’s and a man with a Victorian sense of propriety, urged his parishioners to emulate the fidelity of a small bird called the dunnock. Be thou like the dunnock, he told them – the female and the male impeccably faithful to each other. What would the Rev ...”

“... The largest controversy provoked at home by the Indian Mutiny seven years earlier had been about Charles John Canning’s attempts as governor-general to rein back the brutality of the military reprisals. A slave revolt in Jamaica in 1831, seven years before formal emancipation, had been visited with hundreds of executions, albeit after some form of ...”

“... Pickering and Chatto offer us a seven-volume Complete Works, placing Wollstonecraft alongside Darwin, Babbage and Malthus in their Masters series, and allowing us to consider her as an intellectual being rather than Ingpen’s lonely and pathetic heroine of romance. How does she stand up to this bold treatment? Very well indeed, and far better man Ingpen ...”

“... military band. It was all very amicable, but the humiliation festered in the heart of the young Charles de Gaulle, who would go on, nearly seventy years later, to block the UK’s entrance to the Common Market.Pozzi, who translated Darwin and ‘had his suits and curtains made from material sent from London’, is ...”

“... illness that for sixteen years or more has hung over him. What Edna Healey has written of Charles and Emma Darwin in Wives of Fame could equally be written of Peter and Jean Medawar: ‘as he laboured through the dark, it was essential for him to know that she was there, steady and serene in the sunlight at the end ...”

“... rapidly making it the unchallenged capital of the world. Involved, because, like Dr Johnson and Charles Lamb, Scharf was a tireless London perambulator who desired no more from life (apart from a decent income) than to savour and capture the variety and energy of city living. Scharf (1788-1860) was an itinerant Bavarian artist whom the fortunes of war ...”

“... the turn of the century can be contained within it: Jack London, Theodore Dreiser, Stephen Crane, Charles Chesnutt, Edith Wharton, Kate Chopin. McElrath and Crisler, however, claim that the naturalist novel has been slighted by scholars in favour of the realist. This was true when they began writing their biography, thirty years ago, but it is not true any ...”

“... DC. Another player made up an occasional fourth man. Isaiah Berlin was happy, at least when Charles (Chip) Bohlen was unavailable, to furnish an urbane ditto to their ruthlessness. Almost as if to show that academics and intellectuals may be tough guys, too – the most lethal temptation to which the contemplative can fall victim – Berlin’s ...”