My first thank you must go to my agent Will Francis. Will is the only person to have been with each of my books from the very conception of a new project, when the idea is still inchoate and fuzzy-edged, through the development of the proposal, writing and to its birth on publication day, and his insightful guidance is a never-ending source of support. Huge thanks too to the rest of the outstanding team at Janklow and Nesbit in London: Kirsty Gordon, Mairi Friesen-Escandell, Ren Balcombe, Corissa Hollenbeck, Ellis Hazelgrove, Michael Steger, Maimy Suleiman, as well as PJ Mark and Ian Bonaparte in the New York office.
I’m also enormously grateful to Stuart Williams at The Bodley Head for so enthusiastically taking on this book for publication, and especially to Jörg Hensgen, whose keen editorial eye once again improved the manuscript and the clarity of my thinking immeasurably. He is the sculpting and polishing to my flabby first draft. Thanks too to Sam Wells and Fiona Brown for copy-editing and proofreading, respectively, Alex Bell for the index, and Rhiannon Roy and Laura Reeves for overseeing the whole publication process. I absolutely adore Kris Potter’s eye-popping jacket design (who also worked his magic on the covers for The Knowledge and Origins). Incidentally, the human sketch is ‘A Nude Throwing’ by the eighteenth-century Swiss painter Henry Fuseli. Thanks also to Joe Pickering and Carmella Lowkis for their help in the marketing and publicity of the finished book.
I’ve also benefitted enormously from the help so generously offered by various researchers and experts along the way, including (in alphabetical order): Koen Bostoen, Brad Elliot, Douglas Howard, Stephen Luscombe, Nichola Raihani, Liron Rozenkrantz, Alex Stewart, Kaj Tallungs, Yuhan Sohrab-Dinshaw Vevaina, and Amelia Walker – a huge thanks to each and every one of you. A special thank-you goes to my research assistants Rob Hampton, Sara Knudsen and Megan Bryant, who helped me wrangle my notes, chase down references, assemble the Endnotes and Bibliography, and a thousand and one other essential tasks.
Finally, and most heartfelt, is my gratitude to my wonderful wife Davina Bristow. She has been a pillar of unwavering support and encouragement, and this book wouldn’t be what it is without her own scientific storyteller’s eye. This book is dedicated to her, and our son Sebastian.