Alfred Russel Wallace: A life by Peter Raby, Chatto & Windus, £20, ISBN 0701168382
YOU may know that Alfred Russel Wallace was an adventurer, collector, naturalist and biogeographer, but you might be surprised to learn that he was also a socialist and spiritualist. Wallace was one of the greatest scientific minds in Victorian Britain. But although he was bedecked with honours during his lifetime, including the Royal Medal of the Linnean Society and the Order of Merit, he slipped into relative obscurity for many years, his fame and reputation largely eclipsed by that of Charles Darwin.
Raby recounts Wallace’s quite extraordinary…
