Michael Boulter is a paleobiologist whose formative intellectual years were spent as a student at University College London. As an undergraduate in the 1960s, he attended lectures by the biologists J.B.S. Haldane, Jacques Monod and Francis Crick; they were delivered in a lecture theatre that replaced Macaw Cottage, Charles and Emma Darwin's home in the early 1840s. 'Each term there seemed to be discussions and parties everywhere; people mixing, arguing and dancing. Artists at the Slade smashed their guitars on the floor, and medics in Mecklenburg sic Square talked about Bach' (p. xix). To a working-class young man, born in Leicester during World War II and destined to work in a hosiery factory (before attending grammar school and winning a place at UCL), this was exciting stuff. 'I was away from the salvaged bags and hosiery and into the bright new generation of Bloomsbury scientists. I was taking over from where these well-known intellectuals had left off before the Second World War' (p. xix). Bloomsbury Scientists is something of a love letter to these earlier generations of intellectuals, focused on the period from 1880 to 1940.
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