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“... had the classic Germans before him; Alexander von Humboldt came more readily to his mind than John Locke did. The issues between us, Leibniz said of Locke, are matters of some importance; he referred to Plato the good guy and Aristotle, not so good. Many of the nature/nurture arguments seem also to recapitulate the scholastic Christian and Muslim problem ...”

“... I have recently read The History Men by John Kenyon. I remember reading a different book, The History Man by Malcolm Bradbury, some years ago. I did not find Bradbury’s book at all funny, which I am told it is intended to be. After a careful reading I had not the slightest inkling of what the book was supposed to be about ...”

“... general reader over to the Darwinian point of view by sheer force of reason. His aim is to explain Darwin’s view of life, not just so that we understand the words, but so that we ‘feel it in the marrow of [our] bones’. Sensibly enough, Dawkins begins his task with the problem which Darwin’s theory of evolution by ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... earth and the sun, still used for measurements within the solar system.) Humboldt was seventy when Darwin published his Journal and Remarks (1839) about his voyage on HMS Beagle, the basis for his hypothesis about evolution by natural selection. Humboldt himself had set out in 1799, at 29, to make a five-year circuit of the Spanish colonies in the ...”

“... the direct claim that the creation of life was ‘not of impossible occurrence’, citing Erasmus Darwin in support; Mary Shelley’s images have often been picked up by later writers of unquestioned Science Fiction, as if by some mysterious affinity. Even her short story, ‘The Transformation’, which Aldiss mentions, seems to have come to life again in ...”

“... 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 job. For the ...”

“... are not infrequently pulverised, it seems, by the trucks of the huge road-trains from Alice to Darwin. I should have thought it an excellent title, though Chatwin did not. Meanwhile Aboriginals in the bar are listening to a big white man who has fought in France and married a girl from Leicester. He had heard we were surveying sacred sites.   ‘Know ...”

“... feeling that the new sense will begin to sound normal in the 21c. – but not yet. Marx said of Darwin that his world of competitive striving between species bore a remarkable similarity to the realities of Victorian economic life. In a similar spirit one can say that the linguistic ideology of descriptivism pays a contemporary deference to the power of ...”

“... IQ to race or class, a fundamentalist approach to biology that has its roots in the Twenties in John Davenport’s testimony to Congress that alcoholism, poverty and avarice are genetically determined traits of Irish, Italian and Jewish populations, respectively. It is easy to criticise such views as ‘standing on a mountain of ash’ (as Pollack ...”

“... was often a squiggly-line theory of progress. When Hegel talked about the cunning of reason, when Darwin dwelt on the countless false trails in the tortuous path of natural selection, they were unwittingly providing concepts so elastic that they could stretch to a thousand short-term excuses. Setbacks were thus reinterpreted as temporary aberrations or ...”

“... elections of the last twenty years. Carter has refused to debate Edward Kennedy, and now John Anderson, and thus Reagan. Reagan in turn has been bound and gagged by his advisers, their hostage rather than their boss, in the apparent belief that he cannot live up to the media pitches devised by them on his behalf. There has hardly, therefore, been ...”

“... It is a pleasure to write about a book that is so well-written. John Tyler Bonner is a biologist who not only knows a great deal about plants and animals but has thought long and carefully about problems of evolution. He has a cool and judicious attitude that allows him to settle contentious questions without fuss ...”

“... has origins that can be traced to Scotland in the 1720s, where, from his ministry near Dundee, John Glas dissented from the practice of covenanting and insisted that a national church of Scotland under Parliamentary control was not sanctioned by the Bible. In the growth of the breakaway church Glas’s son-in-law Robert Sandeman played a seminal ...”

“... the early part, in the narrator’s consciousness, can be delicious: as good as Virginia Woolf, or John Betjeman, who would have adored subtle pentameters like ‘The irregular line of elms by the deep lane’. And like Sonnets from the Portuguese, which Robert Browning had advised Elizabeth to present as translations, and which were not published as her own ...”