8/9/2019 SF Books - July

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THE JUNIOR OFFICERS READING

CLUB BY PATRICK HENNESSEY

PENGUIN,

PAPERBACK,

9.99

One of the few

good things about

war is that it has

inspired some

top-class writing

from the poetry

of Wilfred Owen

in the First World War, to the memoirs of

George MacDonald Fraser in the Second,

to the extraordinary dispatches of Michael

Herr from Vietnam or Ernest Hemingwayfrom Spain. More recently, however, as

the nature of fighting has altered, so too

has the quality of the literature, which

has seen something of a decline. This

account, while not perhaps worthy of

mention in such exalted company, does

much to redress the balance by offering

a compelling impression of life and death

for British soldiers fighting in Iraq and

Afghanistan.

SCOTLAND: 1,000 THINGS YOU

NEED TO KNOW BY EDWIN

MOORE

ATLANTIC BOOKS,

PAPERBACK

8.99

Whether youre

a native or a

newcomer to

Scotland thisbook will surprise,

amuse and

inform in equal measure as Moore

finds facts that would have bypassed

or slipped the brains of all but the most

encyclopaedically-minded of Scots.

Presented as a series of bite-size facts and

figures, it covers subjects as diverse as the

five best massacres to the ten greatest

malts; from the countrys varied flora and

fauna, to its human inhabitants who were

well-known for their love of a fight.

while studying at the University of Edinburgh, at that time one of the more

progressive educational institutions in the world. And, while its dangerous

to adopt the counter-factual when dealing with history, it seems that, had

Darwin stayed down in England, he would have grown up in an educational

system that was still very much based on the orthodoxies of the Church

of England thus the great naturalists theories might neither never have

been so revolutionary, nor so close to the truth.

Perhaps the most important of the ideas he was exposed to north of

the Border was James Huttons theory of deep time. This challenged

Archbishop Ushers belief that the world was only 6,000 years old, a time-

span in which Darwinian evolution could not possibly have occurred. As a

result, while his voyage aboard the Beagle was clearly the catalyst for the

formulation of Darwins evolutionary ideas, Edinburgh did indeed help to

furnish the scientist with a bedrock on which to place later discoveries made

in more exotic surrounds.

Darwin inScotlandBY J F DERRYWHITTLESPUBLISHING, PAPERBACK, 18.99

Given that the great biologists time

north of the Border was limited to

two years as a teenage medical

undergraduate, any claims that

Scotland played an influential

role in the ultimate development

of On the Origin of the Species

might seem somewhat tenuous.

Yet, in reality, through extensive

interviews with leading academics,

Derry is able to point to the crucial

influence that Enlightenment

Edinburgh was to have on Darwins developing

mind. For, although many of the eminent biologists theories emerged fully-

formed from the brain that lay behind one of the most luxuriant beards of

the Victorian era, the seeds for these thoughts may well have been planted

Derry is able to point to the crucial influencethat Enlightenment Edinburgh was to have

on Darwins developing mind

TOcovercoverWORDSROB FLETCHER

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