Charles Darwin: Voyaging, by Janet Browne (Pimlico, £12.50 in UK)

This is the first volume of a two part biography and takes Darwin (born in 1809) into the middle 1850s. By that time he had made his famous Beagle voyage, amassed a huge armoury of facts and empirical discoveries, and was in his prime both as a man and as a thinker. He was, on the whole, a modest man who preferred hard work to theorising, and the controversies into which he was increasingly pulled were not of his own seeking. In private life and he was essentially a private person Darwin was a happily married man, and he also owed a good deal to his gifted brother, Erasmus. Well illustrated.