IT HAS always irked me that Darwin is known by the iconic image of him as a bearded ancient being, when his world-changing ideas came to him as a virile young man. Happily, this book redresses the balance.
We see how he was a mediocre student, a “slacker” at university even though he read voraciously. Highly sensitive, introspective and obsessive – he made lists of everything, and it has been suggested that he had Asperger’s syndrome – he eventually pushed an idea to its logical conclusion and changed the world forever.
