Looking after such a convinced vale- tudinarian as her husband was no picnic for Emma but Mrs Charles Darwin’s Recipe Book suggests a resolute culinary ingenuity. Some of her dishes, even in the context of a most attractively produced book combining the practical and the informative in an ideally Victorian fashion, have too irredeemably period a look. Arrowroot pudding belongs firmly to the sickroom and a boiled chicken garnished with macaroni is rather too Mrs-Beetonish for my taste. I enjoyed making several others, such as Nesselrode pudding (exquisite), beef collops (interesting), and rice patties (toothsome), so I may give the invalid food a go if only for the sake of a closer walk with 19th-century gastronomy.

Sean Carroll’s book, subtitled ‘Epic Adventures in the Search for Remarkable Creatures’, celebrates the work of adventurous 19th-century figures like Alfred Russell Wallace or the Dutch anthropologist Eugene Dubois and of modern pioneers such as Mary Leakey and Linus Pauling in extending the reach of Darwinian science. Carroll, a genetics professor like Steve Jones, has an agreeably conversational style, giving personal immediacy to what might so easily have been a mere progress-report on the quest for natural origins during the past 150 years. There are a few minor factual errors. In no circumstances, for example, could either Thomas Huxley, a school- master’s son, or Alfred Russell Wallace, whose father was an attorney with a private income, be described as working-class. Otherwise, this book, proving that the Darwinian revolution is far from over, offers a bracing tonic for those whose rational enjoyment of the natural universe currently seems in danger of being overwhelmed by the strident infantilism of creationists or the snake-oil pedlars of ‘intelligent design’. 

Darwin’s Island: The Galapagos in the Garden of England by Steve Jones (Little, Brown, £20, pp. 307, ISBN 9781408700006)

The Young Charles Darwin by Keith Thomson (Yale, £18.99, pp. 276, ISBN 9780300136081)

Mrs Charles Darwin’s Recipe Book revived and illustrated by Dusha Bateson and Wesley Janeway (Glitterati Incorporated, $35, pp. 175, ISBN 9780980155730)

Remarkable Creatures by Sean Carroll (Quercus, £16.99, pp. 331, ISBN 9781847247216)

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