Eye of newt and toe of frog aplenty

This book is a metaphor: a book about a museum that is itself a museum, crammed with cabinets and curiosities; a natural history of the Natural History Museum. It contains collections, of objects and of people; it educates and entertains; it helps you to see the world, and the NHM, with new eyes.

Richard Fortey is an ideal guide. He has loved the NHM for most of his life, from the moment of being interviewed for a job there in 1970 until his retirement in 2007 as Keeper of Palaeontology, a Fellow of the Royal Society and President of the Geological Society.

He takes as his text taxonomy, the basis for naming the living world: ‘If you don’t have the names of things, the knowledge of them is lost.’ Without Linnaeus’s binomial system of genus and species it would be impossible to order the NHM’s 80 million objects into the inventory of nature that it is.