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“... Some years ago, a National Enquirer headline announced that Martians had killed off the dinosaurs while visiting Earth to do some big-game hunting. It is hard to imagine such an explanation for the extinction of the trilobites – hard-shelled creatures that looked like giant woodlice. Compared with T. rex and triceratops, they lack the trophy quality ...”

“... of perfect enlightenment. As a way of presenting scientific history, however, it is anathema to James Secord. His method is to investigate almost everything to do with Vestiges except its actual content. He looks, for example, at its contemporary readership to show how different social circles constructed their own interpretation of the book. Each ...”

“... even lowering the lane outside his house to protect himself from view. It’s a subject that James Moore has made particularly his own, providing the definitive account of Darwin’s fears, phobias and life options in his lynchpin essay in The Darwinian Heritage. The Darwinian Heritage is a richly-detailed volume, daunting in size. It contains 31 ...”

“... would respect the modestly reformed political and religious hierarchy. This is the backdrop to James Secord’s concise and engaging survey of the popular science literature that transformed the book trade during the 1830s. The era has been viewed as something of a literary hiatus, with Romanticism in decline after Byron and the Victorian serial yet ...”

“... about the effect of evolutionary theory on the art and literature of the 19th century – by James Secord in Victorian Sensation, Gillian Beer in Darwin’s Plots and A.N. Wilson in God’s Funeral – that it is surprising as well as frustrating that Harris takes no account of it. Had she been more curious about the variety and striking contrasts ...”

“... a man of letters. He is all combined; and perhaps he is something more.’In​ the 1830s, as James Secord has shown, scientific literature had become hugely popular with the reading public. In fiction, it was an interregnum between the age of poets, such as Poe’s hero Lord Byron, and the full flourishing of the 19th-century novel. Popularisers of ...”

“... than the vigorous High Victorian years. From the world of Landseer and Dickens to that of Henry James and Whistler, what Charles Darwin elsewhere called the ‘tone’ of mind had changed.Darwin turned 69 in February 1878. He felt that ‘large & difficult subjects’ were now beyond him and that ‘considering my age … it will be the more prudent course ...”

“... 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 general laws out of large ...”

“... of science and they are brilliantly elucidated in another omission from Brewer’s bibliography, James Secord’s Victorian Sensation: The Extraordinary Publication, Reception and Secret Authorship of ‘Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation’ (2000). Secord is director of the Darwin Correspondence Project and ...”