'I never saw a more striking coincidence, ' said Darwin unhappily in 1858. Unknown to him, Alfred Russel Wallace had arrived independently at the same theory of evolution by natural selection. This concluding volume of Janet Browne's biography covers the transformation in Darwin's life after the first unexpected announcement of his & Wallace's theory, followed by publication of Darwin's influential The Origin of Species a year afterwards in 1859. Always a private man by nature, Darwin suddenly found himself a controversial figure, reviewed & discussed in circles that stretched far beyond the boundaries of Victorian science, one of the leading thinkers of the nineteenth century. The second half of Darwin's life was inextricably interwoven with the story of The Origin of Species, & this biography looks closely at the wider publishing world of Victorian England & the different audiences which responded to his ideas. Darwin relied heavily on his friends & family, his publishing contacts, his correspondence network, & the expanding geographical & economic horizons of Victorian Britain to distribute his views to the furthest corners of Empire. This biography considers the Darwinian revolution from Darwin's point of view
- & what it was like to become a scientific celebrity.
...

Charles Waterton was the first conservationist who fought to protect wild nature against the destruction & pollution of Victorian industrialisation. During his lifetime he was famous for his eccentricities, but also for his achievements & his opinions. A Yorkshire landowner, he turned his park into a sanctuary for animals & birds. As an explorer he learned to survive in the tropical rain forests of South America without a gun or the society of other white men. He was an authority on the poisons used by South American Indians & a taxidermist of note. The huge public that read his books included Dickens, Darwin & Roosevelt. Since his death the memory of Waterton's personal eccenticities has flourished, while the originality of his ideas & work has often suffered. Using his surviving papers, Julia Blackburn has redressed the balance in a biogr aphy that restores Waterton to his place as the first conservationist of the modern age. ...

Charlie Johnson is a veteran war correspondent who thinks he has seen it all
- until he makes one rash expedition into a war zone
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ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED AS: THE DAREDEVIL DESPERADOS OF DESTINY

This fourth volume of Charlie Small's journal was found by one

...

At the end of his fifth journal, Charlie Small rocketed out of the strange & dark Underworld, over desert sands & a snowy white mountain range. With a table cloth over his head & a cushion strapped round his bottom, Charlie parachuted right into the middle of a small, swampy isl&.

Clutching a mainly blank map that

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No one knows the full story of Charlie Small. His battered journal was found washed up on a remote, windswept shore. & at first we thought it an elaborate hoax. Surely no eight-year-old could have had so many wild adventures, witnessed so many extraordinary things, lived such an incredible life
- & still only be eight. & yet.. . there was something so vivid in the telling, that we were persuaded to send the journal for analysis.

The results were absolutely astonishing. Everything in the journal of Charlie Small is true. He really has wrestled a deadly river croc, ridden a steam-powered rhino & been tribal chief in a city of gorillas. & countless other things besides. &.. . not only that.. . even though Charlie Small is only eight, he must have lived for over four hundred years!


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