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’s 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’s back; and “Darwin was a romantic”. It is fascinating if unpersuasive, Leroi says. And he is finding Richard Dawkins’s The Ancestor’s Tale (Weidenfeld) a “slog through the history of life in reverse”. Fiction? When W. G. Sebald died in 2001, “I had to find another writer to satisfy my appetite for bleak, boring and misanthropic novels,” Leroi says. “Happily I found V. S. Naipaul.” Travel? “Of our fellow Europeans, the Greeks are at once the most loveable and the most alien,” Leroi says. Sofka Zinovieff’s Eurydice Street: A place in Athens (Granta) explains why. “It is essential reading for philhellenes.”
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