杏吧原创

What are you reading? The Romantic Conception of Life: Science and philosophy in the age of Goethe (Chicago University Press, 2002) by Robert Richards, the US鈥檚 leading historian of biology. He aims to rehabilitate the German Naturphilosophes: Friedrich Schelling was the first to use the word evolution in its modern sense; Goethe counted the metre of his verse on the vertebrae of his mistress鈥檚 back; and 鈥淒arwin was a romantic鈥�. It is fascinating if unpersuasive, Leroi says. And he is finding Richard Dawkins鈥檚 The Ancestor鈥檚 Tale (Weidenfeld) a 鈥渟log through the history of life in reverse鈥�. Fiction? When W. G. Sebald died in 2001, 鈥淚 had to find another writer to satisfy my appetite for bleak, boring and misanthropic novels,鈥� Leroi says. 鈥淗appily I found V. S. Naipaul.鈥� Travel? 鈥淥f our fellow Europeans, the Greeks are at once the most loveable and the most alien,鈥� Leroi says. Sofka Zinovieff鈥檚 Eurydice Street: A place in Athens (Granta) explains why. 鈥淚t is essential reading for philhellenes.鈥�