Crying Wolfe

He might be 85 but Tom Wolfe is going strong with a new book and a dustjacket photo that still sees him working the suit and hat look. And although the new book may be small, it’s got big ambitions: first, to take down an establishment icon, and, second, to reveal the secret behind humanity’s progress.

The establishment icon first. He is that infamous scoundrel, Charles Darwin — ‘Charlie’, as Wolfe often calls him, and not in a friendly way. Wolfe’s Darwin is a pampered, privileged product of a duplicitous and ruthless British elite, a man who never had to do a day’s work in his life, who spent 20 years not publishing his thoughts about evolution and then wrote his book in a panic only after he realised that some oik called Alfred Russel Wallace was about to beat him to it, and whose drawling pals suavely elbowed Wallace out of posterity’s picture.