{"product_id":"charles-darwin","title":"Charles Darwin","description":"\u003cp\u003eHugely enjoyable' - Spectator\n'A lucid, elegantly written and thought-provoking social and intellectual history' - Evening Standard\n'As a historian trying to put Darwin in the context of his time, there is surely no better biographer than Wilson' - The Times\n'A work of scholarship that is hard to put down' - Deborah Cadbury\n\nCharles Darwin: the man who discovered evolution? The man who killed off God? Or a flawed man of his age, part genius, part ruthless careerist who would not acknowledge his debts to other thinkers?\n\nIn this bold new life - the first single volume biography in twenty-five years - A. N. Wilson, the acclaimed author of The Victorians and God's Funeral, goes in search of the celebrated but contradictory figure Charles Darwin.\n\nDarwin was described by his friend and champion, Thomas Huxley, as a 'symbol'. But what did he symbolize? In Wilson's portrait, both sympathetic and critical, Darwin was two men. On the one hand, he was a naturalist of genius, a patient and precise collector and curator who greatly expanded the possibilities of taxonomy and geology. On the other hand, Darwin, a seemingly diffident man who appeared gentle and even lazy, hid a burning ambition to be a universal genius. He longed to have a theory which explained everything.\n\nBut was Darwin's 1859 master work, On the Origin of Species, really what it seemed, a work about natural history? Or was it in fact a consolation myth for the Victorian middle classes, reassuring them that the selfishness and indifference to the poor were part of nature's grand plan?\n\nCharles Darwin: Victorian Mythmaker is a radical reappraisal of one of the great Victorians, a book which isn't afraid to challenge the Darwinian orthodoxy while bringing us closer to the man, his revolutionary idea and the wider Victorian age.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"John Murray Press","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":42973619716262,"sku":"9781444794885","price":24.9,"currency_code":"MYR","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0443\/8471\/4918\/products\/9781444794885_1.jpg?v=1656048395","url":"https:\/\/bookxcess.myshopify.com\/products\/charles-darwin","provider":"Staging Site ","version":"1.0","type":"link"}