Extraordinarily wide-ranging and engaging ... Stott's gifts as a novelist mean that each of her subjects emerges as living in ordinary weather and among objects, family and political difficulties ... She draws on an array of scholarship and assembles it into an intricate sequence of stories and investigations that are her own ... Gripping * Gillian Beer, The Sunday Telegraph *
Riveting ... told with style and historical nous ... Stott has done a wonderful job in showing just how many extraordinary people had speculated on where we came from before the great theorist dispelled any doubts * Richard Fortey, Guardian *
A fascinating history of an idea that is crucial to our understand of life on earth * Ziauddin Sardar, Independent *
***** Mesmerising, colourful and often moving ... a richly drawn exploration of the key figures on Darwin's list ... this many threaded story of intellectual development is hypnotic. The subject is science, but Stott has a novelist's confidence ... this is a sympathetic examination of the innate human qualities of curiosity and inquiry * Daily Telegraph *
Thrilling ... impressively researched ... A gripping and ambitious history of science which gives a vivid sense of just how many forebears Darwin had; even if none of them can match the man himself * Sunday Times *
Rebecca Stott's beautifully written and compelling book is the story of some of the men - and they were all men - who came before, and how the evolution of their ideas mirrors the evolution of species ... These mavericks and heretics put their lives on the line. Finally, they are getting the credit they deserve * Independent on Sunday *
Clever, compassionate and compellingly written, Stott has interwoven history and science to enchanting effect. The evolution of the theory of evolution is a brilliant idea for a book, and she has realised it wonderfully * Tom Holland *
Stott's research is broad and unerring; her book is wonderful ... An exhilerating romp through 2,000 years of fascinating scientific history * Nature *
From Aristotle onwards, evolutionists have - thank God - always been a quarrelsome lot; and not much has changed. Rebecca Stott shows how dispute, prejudice and rage have accompanied their science from the very beginning. Darwin's Ghosts is a gripping history of the history of life and of those who have studied it, with plenty of lessons for today - perhaps for today's biologists most of all * Steve Jones *
A masterful retelling of the collective daring of a few like-minded men who had the courage to publish their speculations at a time when to do so, for political as well as religious reasons, was to risk everything. It is the story of an idea that would change the modern world * Observer *
Impressive scholarship and compelling narrative; a fine book * Brenda Maddox *
Charles Darwin provided the mechanism for the evolution of the exquisite adaptations found in plants and animals but the awareness that species can change had been growing long before him. With wonderful clarity Rebecca Stott traces how ideas about biological evolution themselves evolved in the minds of great biologists from Aristotle onwards. Darwin would have loved this brilliant book - and so do I * Sir Patrick Bateson, President of the Zoological Society of London *
Ms. Stott stages sharply drawn encounters and depicts domestic lives and social worlds in rich and convincing detail ... captures the breathless excitement of investigation on the cusp of the unknown ... a lively, original book * International Herald Tribune *
It takes great skill and scholarship to tell the story well, and Rebecca Stott does it wonderfully. Here is a rich tale indeed. It needs a novelist like Rebecca Stott to get to grips with it; and so she does, triumphantly * The Literary Review *
Stott provides the lucid intellectual genealogy of evolution that the great man could not * New Scientist *
Stott's lively, original history of evolutionary ideas flows easily across continents and centuries * New York Times Notable Books of 2012 *
The ghosts so richly described in Ms Stott's enjoyable book are the descendants of Aristotle and Bacon and the ancestors of today's scientists * Wall Street Journal *
In telling the stories of these men, Ms. Stott - who is also a novelist - writes with a novelist's flair ... richly described * Wall Street Journal Europe *