“... 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 ...”

“... indicative of the complexity of the links between productivity and diversity. They provided Charles Darwin with one of many pointers to the entwined relationship between the evolutionary diversity of form and the ecological context in which it is embedded, a topic that continues to preoccupy ecologists. Experiments in ecology are among the most ...”

“... a scent of seawater. The theory of evolution is ascribed to Alfred Russel Wallace rather than to Charles Darwin, and it is ‘Shrösteinberg’s [rather than Shrödinger’s] anxiously anticipant cat’ which waits to discover if it is alive or dead within its box. We gradually realise that the main source of these errors, or differences between our ...”

“... targets. And Kelly writes in interesting detail about the influence on Herzen of Francis Bacon and Charles Darwin. But the passion – and torment – that drove Herzen flashes only intermittently in her book. Kelly quotes Tolstoy saying that ‘Herzen awaits his readers in the future. Far above the heads of the present crowd, he transmits his thoughts to ...”

“... of the geographical distribution of plants which gave powerful support to the ideas of his friend Charles Darwin. Sir William Thistleton-Dyer (son-in-law of Joseph and director, 1885-1905) promoted the laboratory through which experimental physiological botany established itself in this country. But state funding for science was limited and Sir William ...”

“... Navy breadfruit voyage in 1793.) The theory of natural selection was also a by-product of empire: Charles Darwin went along for the ride on the survey barque HMS Beagle as unpaid gentleman’s companion to the captain. Hydrography, meteorology and cartography in the aid of empire were the Beagle’s missions, evolutionary theory its unintended ...”

“... is not – or not only – a form of self-indulgence. It is also a form of pathological empathy. Charles Darwin wanted to be a doctor, but was too sensitive to human suffering. It is a worrying thought – worrying enough to raise the pulse rate – that nurses and doctors are an elite, self-selected as sufficiently insensitive to get on with the ...”

“... increase over two years.’ Crawl-mania would warrant a chapter to itself in any new edition of Charles Mackay’s Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds. Daredevil feats of kamikaze diving would often precede demonstrations of the new stroke: Deakin mentions that ‘Jack Overhill’s son, also Jack, used to perform 50-foot ...”

“... who make many species are the “splitters” and those who make few are the “lumpers”,’ Charles Darwin wrote in 1857 to his friend, the great botanist Joseph Hooker. This first recorded appearance of the handy distinction between those who bundle up the data into one big theory and those who prefer to lay out the exhibits on the table in ...”

“... Men’: the select club of Midlanders that included Joseph Priestley, James Watt and Erasmus Darwin. But many of Wedgwood’s more radical ideals were in direct conflict with the needs of his business, which involved putting expensive, intricate ornamental vases on royal and aristocratic tables to stimulate emulative demand among the ‘middling ...”

“... commerce, Unsworth sets Matthew Paris, nephew of the ship’s owner and free-thinking precursor to Charles Darwin. Paris ‘liberates’ the Liverpool Merchant’s cargo and establishes a kind of Rousseauesque commune in Florida. In London, meanwhile, his cousin Erasmus Kemp foresakes romance for cash and becomes a smooth operator in the sugar trade. His ...”

“... become a boom industry of late, but its most brilliant practitioner was the man who invented it: Charles Darwin, in The Descent of Man and above all The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals. The idea is to explain how the psychological traits of human beings can be explained as evolutionary solutions to environmental problems of very long ...”

“... Fitzroy had been the captain of the Beagle, which several decades earlier had carried the young Charles Darwin around the world to conduct the research that eventually bore fruit in On the Origin of Species (1859), and because he was a devout evangelical, some historians have chalked up his suicide to guilt over his unwitting complicity in the genesis ...”

“... who coined the term ‘eugenics’ and whose racist arguments had some influence with his cousin Charles Darwin, frequented the slave markets of Constantinople; he noted how delighted young African women seemed to be at the prospect of their impending enslavement. ‘They seemed as merry as possible at the prospect of being sold,’ he enthuses, ‘and ...”