Colin Tudge
Selectioneering
Darwin’s Ghosts: In Search of the First Evolutionists
By Rebecca Stott
Bloomsbury 383pp £25 order from our bookshop
Science is a human pursuit and the history of its ideas, like all human history, is messy; the bigger the idea, the messier its history tends to be. No idea that anyone has had since, say, Muhammad founded Islam, has had more impact than Charles Darwin’s grand notion of evolution by means of natural selection, presented to the world in what he regarded as no more than a sketch in On the Origin of Species in 1859. The idea had its roots in natural history, of course, but also in politics, economics, metaphysics and religion, and has been developed by battalions of thinkers – some generous and humble, some jealous and mean-spirited. It takes great skill and scholarship to tell the story well, and Rebecca Stott does it wonderfully.
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
This 'jaunty narrative raises fundamental questions about the role of popular history. Should this just be a matter of telling tales, as the general public often seems to think?'
@DrLRoach weighs up Charles Spencer's account of the White Ship Disaster.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/wholl-take-the-helm
'Amis clearly belongs to the do-as-I-say-not-as-I-do school of pedagogy. More or less everything he says is demonstrably contradicted by elements of his own work, be they here or elsewhere.'
https://literaryreview.co.uk/never-without-a-hitch
'The bar is set high at the outset, and readers are primed to wonder if Mikhail can make his case.'
Does Alan Mikhail's new life of the Sultan Selim I really overturn 'shibboleths that have held sway for a millennium'? Caroline Finkel investigates.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/master-of-the-universe-3