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“... about a revolution, but in his amiable ordinariness he was a most unlikely candidate for genius. Janet Browne’s magisterial two-volume biography of Darwin takes as its epigraph a line from The Woman in White: ‘We don’t want genius in this country, unless it is accompanied by respectability.’ Darwin was a genius tailor-made to Victorian ...”

“... great sensitivity to Darwin’s intellectual inheritance. It suffers, too, by comparison with Janet Browne’s meticulous history of biogeography, which is uncommonly lucid on the modifications Darwin had to make to his theory during the 1840s and 1850s – modifications which, in certain respects, brought him closer to the principles already ...”

“... invite comparison with the experiences of Charles Darwin at Malvern, described here by Dr Janet Browne. This was the period of the heroic cold-water cure popularised by the peasant Vincenz Priessnitz at Gräfenberg in Silesia and profitably taken up by the doctors James Manby Gully and James Wilson. Darwin’s trouble was diagnosed, with his own ...”

“... dominion over the rest of creation. To achieve this balance Darwin was obliged, as the historian Janet Browne has pointed out, to struggle with his vocabulary. He did not use the word ‘evolution’ because in 1859 it meant principally ‘the unfolding of hidden embryological structures’. Instead he talked of ‘descent with modification’. The ...”

“... and causes of madness were directly legible in the physiognomies of the insane – although, as Janet Browne points out in her account of Charles Darwin’s encounter with this approach, it seems that what the psychiatrist could see in the photographs of madmen was simply not visible to the layman.) This separation means that even if we acknowledge the ...”

“... claimed to deal with lunatics without coercion. We hope, too, to admire John Conolly and W.A.F. Browne, born thirty and forty years respectively after Haslam. Both were genteel but poor boys who had to struggle for an education; medicine was the obvious career for them. Conolly lectured briefly at the new University of London medical school, was backstabbed ...”

“... interpretation to anything which might otherwise suggest we are being fooled. When, for example, Janet Harper, the teenage girl in the Enfield council house, confesses under hypnosis that she and her sister are responsible for causing ‘all the trouble’, Mr Playfair is worried for only a moment before he decides that what ...”

“... words, one of those rare beings, as likeable as he was impressive.’ To Darwin’s biographer Janet Browne, Darwin was ‘basically a good man, humble and kind, and always did his best to act according to the traditional values he had learned as a child’. ‘It was his very ordinariness,’ she writes, ‘that captivated people expecting to meet a ...”

“... an honesty, a truth of writing, that took my breath away. Be ready. Be seated,’ Verghese warns. Janet Maslin wrote in the New York Times that ‘to read this book is to feel that Dr Kalanithi still lives, with enormous power to influence the lives of others though he is gone’. ‘Unmissable.’ The New Yorker called it ‘a manifesto for the ...”