David Wootton

A clash of two cultures

Jones’s science may be good, but his history is all over the place in No Need for Geniuses, a survey of invention and progress in the Age of the Enlightenment

issue 07 May 2016

‘They fuck you up, your mum and dad.’ Philip Larkin’s most famous line has appeared in the Spectator repeatedly, and there has even been a competition devoted to its refutation. Steve Jones, though, thinks it too coarse to be quoted in what he himself describes as a popular science book.

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