This moment is captured in one of Ruth Padel’s poems, which continues: ‘Sublimate of mercury, brittle feathers, avian/Anatomy. The scalpel tease-and-settling of wings.’ Padel is Darwin’s great-great-grand-daughter and the poetic Erasmus’s two greats more. Her poems are biographical, snatches from moments of Darwin’s life, captured with an economy and fluency that prosaic biographers might envy:

‘The origin of man is now proved.’ The animal
in us
has the loudest tunes. ‘Our grandfather is Satan — in the form
of a baboon!’

Darwin has been biographised many times and there could be little left to say. His letters, notebooks and even marginalia have been scrutinised to fill the gaps in his short and bowdlerised (by his pious wife) autobiography. But these two books, in their very different way, show how much more there is to tell. One fills in a great backdrop of political and scientific context; the other distils the essence of an epic life of adventure, heresy, tragedy and revolution.

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