Science in the Romantic age wasn’t a cold counter to poetry; it was the era’s great adventure, charged with imagination and moral stakes.

Richard Holmes follows the people who made it thrilling: Joseph Banks professionalising curiosity after Pacific voyages; William and Caroline Herschel sweeping the night with giant handmade telescopes; Humphry Davy turning chemistry and nitrous oxide into sell-out theatre; balloonists sketching the Earth from the clouds.

He shows laboratories and field expeditions becoming national stages, and poets treating experiments as sources of metaphor and alarm. Holmes also keeps an unsparing eye on the era’s blind spots: class gatekeeping, imperial swagger, and the women whose work was sidelined even as it reshaped the sky.

This is the origin story of modern public science—its wonder, hype and ethics—and it illuminates the tensions we still live with.