Rebecca Stott is no longer able to come to Bristol for this event. Watershed will be contacting ticket holders about refunds.

Rebecca Stott’s Darwin’s Ghosts is a masterful retelling of the collective daring of a few like-minded men who had the imagination to speculate on nature’s ways and the courage to publish at a time when to do so, for political as well as religious reasons, was to risk everything. Just one month after the publication of On the Origin of Species, Charles Darwin received a letter that deeply unsettled him. It accused him of failing to acknowledge his predecessors. For all the excuses that leapt to mind, Darwin knew he had made a grave error in omitting to mention his intellectual forebears. Yet when he tried to trace these natural philosophers, he found that history had already forgotten them. More than a tale of mummified birds, inland lagoons, Bedouin nomads, secret police files, microscopes and curiosity cabinets, Darwin’s Ghosts: In Search of the First Evolutionists is the story of an idea that would change the modern world.