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“... In a world where dockers vote Tory and Cambridge graduates become KGB colonels, predicting class behaviour is a chancy business. Let me conjure up a still more incongruous example. Conceive a manor-born gentleman, with a private fortune exceeding £30,000 in the 1840s, respectably Whig and with a family dislike of fierce radicalism. He is Cambridge-educated and until recently a prospective parson ...”

“... David Kohn opens his monumental Darwinian Heritage with a deftly-delivered kick, observing that a study of the wider institutional culture of Darwin’s day seems to be ‘beyond the present ken of historians of 19th-century biology’. It’s a well-aimed blow. Little of the Darwin industry’s capital has been spent on exploring evolution in its social context ...”

“... smart enough to understand how he won the Nobel Prize, you, too, could win it. Against the odds, Adrian Desmond has produced a string of popular and learned books about Victorian biology, biologists and the epochal publication of The Origin of Species in 1859: The Ape’s Reflexion (1979), Archetypes and Ancestors (1982), The Politics of Evolution ...”

“... epoch in which any individual could singlehandedly precipitate a major shift in human thought. Adrian Desmond and James Moore place Darwin above Marx and Freud. It is hard to think of successors to that trinity of lone rangers in an age when research is financed by foundations and carried on by teams and generally mounted on the kind of scale where ...”

“... 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 on the Beagle, transmutation, as it was usually called in the 1820s and 1830s, had become a hot topic in some London ...”

“... the bad hat, or mitre. We do not know exactly what the Bishop of Oxford said or what THH replied. Desmond favours a version of ‘was your grandmother a monkey?’, and gives it a plausible class twist. The Bishop was a gentleman, and confident in the identity and ladylike character of his own grandmother, and the grandmothers of the kind of people he sparred ...”

“... physically extracted from others.’ In the other major recent English-language biography, Adrian Desmond and James Moore’s Darwin (1991), the events in Darwin’s life were juxtaposed with the great social and political upheavals of his times: Darwin against the background of the Chartists, the Crystal Palace, the Paris Commune, the Crimean ...”

“... nothing of the will of the deity ... ’ What has now been questioned, and very cleverly so by Desmond in his Archetypes and Ancestors, is whether the conventional image of Owen slain by Huxley gives an accurate picture of the idealists’ contribution to the science of palaeontology. Historians of science have been tempted to say that idealist ...”

“... two realms can successfully be viewed as one has been triumphantly demonstrated by, among others, Adrian Desmond in his Archetypes and Ancestors. Outram scarcely considers the extent to which Cuvier’s success in doing science shaped the course of his career. The history of science has painted itself into a strange corner if that basic issue has become ...”

“... Darwinism’ thongs. The opening line of the year’s most substantial historical contribution, Adrian Desmond and James Moore’s Darwin’s Sacred Cause, is: ‘Global brands don’t come much bigger than Charles Darwin.’ Quite right.Darwin freely confessed to late-onset philistinism: ‘My mind seems to have become a kind of machine for grinding ...”

“... more often than not as source material for whimsical and mildly defamatory character sketches. Adrian Frazier’s painstakingly researched new biography of Moore marks a considerable advance on Joseph Hone’s respectful but pedestrian 1936 standard biography and Tony Gray’s lively but unscholarly 1996 Life. Moore was born in 1852 into the West of ...”

“... extended discussion of the Statesman’s first years was Edward Hyams’s ‘house’ history. Adrian Smith makes a fuller attempt to place the early New Statesman in its various political and intellectual contexts and relates the fortunes of the small-circulation political weekly to the seismic political changes of 1916-29 that virtually destroyed British ...”

“... held in support of the Arvon Foundation, and we were the judges: Basil Bunting, Gwendoline Brooks, Adrian Mitchell, George Barker and myself. I feel vaguely paranoid about any poets but those of my own generation (all dead except for Empson and myself) and was delighted at how well we all got on together. ‘King of the Cats’ (to use Yeats’s phrase about ...”