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
Book review: ‘Man of Iron’ by Julian Glover
Thomas Telford and the Building of Britain.
Book review: ‘The Enlightenment’ by John Robertson
A very short introduction.
Book review: ‘The History of Life’ by Michael J Benton
A very short introduction.
Book review: ‘The Ice Age’ by Jamie Woodward
A very short introduction.
Book review: ‘The Invention of Nature’ by Andrea Wulf
The adventures of Alexander von Humboldt, the lost hero of science.
Book review: ‘The Invention of Science’ by David Wootton
A new history of the Scientific Revolution by David Wootton.
Darwin on earthworms: small change writ large
A review of Charles Darwin's wonderful final book, ‘The Formation of Vegetable Mould, Through the Action of Worms, with Observations on their Habits’.
Bacon and X
Not wishing to boast, but Richard Carter didn't get C-minuses—and he certainly didn't get SEE MEs.