David Stack is Professor of History at University of Reading, UK. He is the author of The First Darwinian Left (2003) and Queen Victoria's Skull (2008, Bloomsbury).
Stack's book does a superior job of reviewing Combe's colorful story. Any scholar with a general interest in Victorian intellectual culture would be well served by this text. Beyond academic readers, Stack's book would probably operate well at the graduate level. -Roger Pauly, History: Reviews of New Books, Winter 2009