Author:Pliny the Elder,John Healey,John Healey,John Healey
Pliny's Natural History is an astonishingly ambitious work that ranges from astronomy to art and from geography to zoology. Mingling acute observation with often wild speculation, it offers a fascinating view of the world as it was understood in the first century AD, whether describing the danger of diving for sponges, the first water-clock, or the use of asses' milk to remove wrinkles. Pliny himself died while investigating the volcanic eruption that destroyed Pompeii in AD 79, and the natural curiosity that brought about his death is also very much evident in the Natural History - a book that proved highly influential right up until the Renaissance and that his nephew, Pliny the younger, described 'as full of variety as nature itself'.
Margaret Forster is alive to the debt we owe to such champions, who made our world so much more hospitable to women
—— Marina Warner , Sunday TimesMargaret Forster writes history with a novelist's eye for details and is interested in the contradictions and conflicts in her heroines' attitudes to their own femininity
—— A. S. Byatt , The TimesHumane, humorous and perceptive
—— Evening StandardInspiring
—— Times Literary SupplementA marvellous book... This second part of the life stands on its own. Soothing, unhurried and absorbing
—— Jane Ridley , SpectatorA fitting tribute to his career, as it combines, in both style and substance, the different themes of his life's work. Blending genuine literary talents with impeccable scientific credentials, Gould crafts an elegant entreaty for scientists and scholars to spend less time complaining about each other and more time combining their considerable resources. We need both the fox and the hedgehog in any intellectual menagerie - the persistent pluralist
—— Alan C. Hutchinson , Globe and Mail
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