Replace the commas in the subtitle of this book, ‘Thomas Young, the Anonymous Polymath who Proved Newton Wrong, Explained How We See, and Deciphered the Rosetta Stone Among Other Feats of Genius’, with exclamation marks, and it reads like the title of a Gillray cartoon or the patter of a circus huckster. The problem we have with polymaths, as Andrew Robinson points out in his introduction, is that they do seem too good to be true. When it comes to Isaiah Berlin’s famous distinction between thinkers — hedgehogs, who know one big thing, and foxes, who know many things — we are generally more comfortable with the hedgehogs. Or rather, preferring to pin thinkers down into easily memorable categories, we will foxes into hedgehogs. The foxes, with their wide-ranging intellectual curiosity and manifold talents excite our suspicion. Perhaps they are plausible quacks; perhaps they force us to acknowledge our own blinkered specialisms.
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