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“... of self-annihilation as the price of knowledge – knowledge about nature, society and identity. Charles Darwin and George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda in the novel of that title, the aesthete Walter Pater and the statistician Karl Pearson, the political economist Harriet Martineau and Dickens’s John Harmon in Our Mutual Friend – all these ...”

“... Blunt’s treason just as, a hundred years earlier, it dealt privately with the pederasty of Charles Vaughan. In 1859 Vaughan, headmaster of Harrow, suddenly left in order to accept a much lower-profile job as vicar of Doncaster. Not until 1964, when Phyllis Grosskurth published her biography of John Addington Symonds, was it revealed that Vaughan had ...”

“... or shy about fighting for their views in public. For example, the 19th-century physicist Sir Charles Wheatstone – inventor of the telegraph, the stereoscope and the concertina, among other devices – could not bring himself to speak out even at informal scientific gatherings where he knew all the participants personally. Just once did he accept an ...”

“... all British publishing houses with an unrivalled list of authors. Lord Byron, David Livingstone, Charles Darwin, Jane Austen, David Ricardo, Thomas Malthus, Benjamin Disraeli, William Ewart Gladstone, Samuel Smiles, Herman Melville and Washington Irving were all published from Albemarle Street. J.M.W. Turner and David Roberts provided illustrations for ...”

“... for Mediterranean exile, or with Janet Browne’s recent first volume of a large-scale life of Charles Darwin. Holmes asks what we might now think of Coleridge had he died shipwrecked off Sicily. The audit is positive: what came next, according to Holmes, only damaged his startling early achievements. Even more tantalising questions might be asked of ...”

“... this last a quotation from, believe it or not, the correspondence of the uxorious Charles Darwin. In such sprightly instances the road to philosophy begins, although it is usually not too long before the going becomes, if not exactly rough, at least resistant. This is not solely attributable to the inherent difficulties of the subject. It ...”

“... case, it is quite clear that many human capacities for communication have a hereditary basis, as Charles Darwin showed long ago – for instance, the smile of an infant and his yell of displeasure. Indeed, all powers of learning and teaching must depend upon particular activities of the brain. Each animal species is programmed to learn in its own ...”

“... and this idea was formulated by men who were naturalists first and evolutionists second. Charles Darwin collected beetles before he embarked in the Beagle, and it was only in thinking about the experiences of that voyage that he became an evolutionist. Alfred Wallace differed in that he was an evolutionist (although he had not conceived the ...”

“... obligation to society. Her father knew many leading figures of the day: Palmerston, Macaulay, Charles Darwin and Annabella Milbanke. In her twenties she came to know Christian von Bunsen, the Prussian ambassador in London, founder of a Protestant hospital in Rome and a German one in London, staffed by deaconesses from a Lutheran establishment at ...”

“... measurable hordes of scientific labourers beavering away from nine to five. Sir Francis Galton was Charles Darwin’s half-cousin, and (like Darwin) left Cambridge with an ordinary degree. He wrote in his autobiography: ‘I had been immensely impressed by many obvious cases of heredity among the Cambridge men who were ...”

“... former schoolchildren to a single, conveniently packaged occurrence: the invention of Evolution in Charles Darwin’s The Origin of Species. It is, however, a date that does not figure in Adrian Desmond’s masterful account of the initial rise and decline of evolutionary theory in Britain. While Darwin was still afloat ...”

“... not only to wrest control of the sickroom from Lord Lovelace and to banish unorthodox friends like Charles Babbage, but to extort the dying woman’s confession of adultery with a neighbour, thereby permanently alienating the married couple. Though Lovelace began an idealised account of the courage with which his wife confronted her suffering, the revelation ...”

“... Socialism, Communism, and all the other isms that then did abound. The ideas expressed by Charles Darwin, R.J. Campbell, Sir Oliver Lodge, Keir Hardie, Ramsay MacDonald, Karl Marx, Noah Ablett were treasured in their minds as well as in the books they carried in their pockets.’ As late as the 1950s, Plato’s Republc was taken out more often ...”

“... peerages. This rule was sufficient to ensure that the greatest Englishman of the 19th century, Charles Darwin, ended his days as plain ‘Mr’. It is not a scandal, it is quite the opposite of a disgrace, to fall within the same tradition as Darwin. Probably none of our other leading historians – Christopher ...”

“... close friends with Ka Cox, and soon met Jacques Raverat, who claimed to be in love both with Gwen Darwin, whom he asked to marry him, and Ka Cox, whom he asked to be his lover after he was married. Raverat, though French, had been sent to school at Bedales, from where he had gone on, first to the Sorbonne, then to Cambridge, where he met Brooke, Ka Cox and ...”