In this bold new life - the first single-volume biography of Charles Darwin in twenty-five years - A.N. Wilson, the acclaimed author of The Victorians and God's Funeral, goes in search of this celebrated but contradictory figure. Darwin was described by his friend and champion Thomas Huxley as a symbol. But what did he symbolize? In Wilson's portrait, both sympathetic and critical, Darwin was two men. On the one hand, he was a brilliant naturalist, a patient and precise collector and curator who greatly expanded the possibilities of taxonomy and geology. On the other hand, Darwin, a seemingly diffident man who appeared gentle and even lazy, hid a burning ambition to be a universal genius: he longed to have a theory that explained everything. But was Darwin's 1859 masterwork, On the Origin of Species, really when it seemed, a work about natural history? Or was it in fact a consolation myth for the Victorian middle classes, reassuring them that selfishness and indifference to the poor we

The evolutionary biologist builds on decades of research to outline a paradigm-changing new approach to the applications of evolutionary theory in today's social and cultural institutions.