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Article: Master taxonomist.('The Compleat Naturalist')(Book Review)
- Article from:
- New Criterion
- Article date:
- January 1, 2003
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2003 Foundation for Cultural Review. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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Wilfred Blunt Linnaeus: The Compleat Naturalist. Princeton University Press, 264 pages, $35
First published more than thirty years ago (in 1970), Wilfred Blunt's thorough biography of the Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus (1707-1778) has been made into a scrumptious coffee-table book. The elder brother of Christopher (merchant banker, authority on medieval coins) and Anthony (Poussin expert, Keeper of the Queen's Pictures, and Soviet spy), Wilfred, who taught at Eton, was a writer without frontiers, characteristically crowding his extensive knowledge into biographies of representative figures from a diversity of cultures.
Blunt has the British sense of ...