Concise yet vividly inventive prose was one of the distinctive features of Huxley: The Devil's Disciple, in which Adrian Desmond took Thomas Huxley's story up to the age of 45. His new book, which takes us from there to Huxley's death in 1895, is even more colourful and epigrammatic. "Nature was presented as a great ironclad bound fast to fate," Desmond writes. Later, "As Miss McConnish leant over the men to dissect a frog's urogenitalia, the writing was on the wall." We hear that someone "returned fresh from Haeckel's Thuringian hills" and that doctors "traded on the endogenous chemical production of fever-producing poisons and parasites".
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