How small experiments led to a big theory.
Book review: ‘Darwin’s Backyard’ by James T Costa
charles darwin
Book review: ‘Dispelling the Darkness’ by John van Wyhe
Voyage in the Malay Archipelago and the discovery of evolution by Wallace and Darwin.
Newsletter No. 13: Bramblings!
bramblings · wheatears · Mary Beard · Beaker folk · Meera Sodha · recipes · John Tyndall · Eunice Foote · religion · Ben Myers · Austin Kleon · Walter Benjamin · giant sloths · Shetland · Neil Ansell · Charles Darwin
Book review: ‘The Ascent of John Tyndall’ by Roland Jackson
A long-overdue biography of the Victorian scientist, mountaineer, and public intellectual.
Book reviews: ‘Charles Darwin: Voyaging’ • ‘Charles Darwin: The Power of Place’
A magnificent two-volume biography.
Newsletter No. 12: Unspeakable things beneath the shrubs
Mark E Smith · Alan Bennett · Carl Linnaeus · Ronald Blythe · human evolution · flu epidemics · Great Exhibition of the North · Charles Darwin · insects · introverts · Virginia Woolf · John Tyndall
Newsletter No. 11: Penguin eggs and yetis
Sir Thomas Browne · Saturn · penguin eggs · heroes of science · evolution of languages · nature books · dna barcoding · periodic table · Alice Roberts · geology
Newsletter No. 9: Teaser or spoiler?
On the Moor · Zanzibar · container ships · giant ground sloth · Barry Lopez · indigenous people · Cambrian Explosion · Little Toller · Iain Sinclair
Newsletter No. 7: Hacked and hurt by time
John Tyndall · Galápagos cormorants · why English is so odd · Thoreau & Darwin · anthropological discoveries · mass-extinction hyperbole · WG Sebald · yellow rattle · Inigo Thomas · Mars exploration
Newsletter No. 5: Incongruous owl
dawn chorus · Simon Armitage · the invention of the telescope · huge, sprawling collaborations · Withnail & I · book smells · re-assembling Darwin’s research notes · converting walks into words · Daniel Dennett · writing letters · humanist politics · dentistry with stone tools · analysing penguin poo · Melissa Harrison · Robert Macfarlane · swallows