I neglected to review this great book about the luminaries of Enlightenment science and literature when I read it. Dava Sobel has just published a glowing review of it. She says:

The author describes his text as “a relay race of scientific stories,”
that “tries to capture something of the inner life of science, its
impact on the heart as well as on the mind.” In this the book succeeds
with verve. I didn't just read The Age of Wonder; I escaped to it, riding happily with its heroes through a blaze of adventures and ideas.

The book demonstrates marvellously not only the absence of two distinct cultures, arts and science, at the time, but also the mutually stimulating embrace between scientific and literary ideas. And of course the fever of discovery in the UK made it the world's industrial leader – something I'll come on to in a forthcoming post about Joel Mokyr's forthcoming book, The Enlightened Economy.