Michael Taylor in conversation with The Pol Roger Duff Cooper Prize

How does it feel to be shortlisted for the Pol Roger Duff Cooper Prize?

It’s a stupendous honour. This prize is one that stands out not only for its history and its reputation, but also because of the quality of the previous winners. It’s truly stunning to be shortlisted for a prize that has gone to historians such as Michael Howard, Peter Hennessy, and Margaret MacMillan, let alone other literary winners like Betjeman, Durrell, and Heaney. I think that even those few names show that the Duff Cooper Prize has rewarded only the very best of writing.

What drew you to the subjects of dinosaurs and religion in Victorian Britain?

I’m a child of the Jurassic Park generation. I spent an awful lot of the early 1990s watching shows about dinosaurs on TV, or playing with dinosaur figurines, or reading dinosaur magazines. Still now, I pay good money to watch the sequels to the Jurassic Park movies, even though they’re getting so bad that the producers – to paraphrase the original film – must be so concerned with whether they can, that they never stop to think whether they should. If you combine this obsession with my general fascination with intellectual history in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, then the subject becomes hard to resist.

How did you plan, research and write Impossible Monsters?

Honestly, this was quite difficult. I began the research into this book in the spring of 2020 which, given that the world was plunging into lockdown, was far from ideal. I had planned to visit any number of archives to go through the papers of the main figures (Lyell, Buckland, Huxley, Darwin, etc.), but that simply wasn’t possible. Happily, the whole project was redeemed by the fact that nearly every scientific paper of the nineteenth century, not to mention every review journal, pamphlet, and book, has been digitised and published online. The other aspect of lockdown – the isolation – did not make things any easier, but the book gave me purpose, and helped me through those dark times.

What were the surprises you encountered along the way?

I knew a lot of the backstory and the general thread of events quite well, but a few things jumped out. First, although I had always intended to use the phenomenon of the discovery of dinosaurs as a means of driving the narrative about geology and palaeontology, I had not appreciated just how important dinosaur fossils were in terms of proving the theory of evolution: dinosaurs and fossils aren’t mentioned in the first edition of On the Origin of Species, but by the 1870s a series of discoveries in Bavaria and America had proved the biological relationship of dinosaurs to modern-day reptiles and birds (indeed, birds are what we call “non-avian” dinosaurs”). The second great thing was how far personal relationships – whether friendship or enmity – drove events. All these men (and they were almost exclusively men) knew each other on a first-name basis; they walked and dined and lived together; and it was the strength or weakness of their relationships which often determined how well their ideas were received.

Tell us how Impossible Monsters can be seen as a continuation or a departure from your earlier books.

My first trade book, The Interest, was a history of the twin campaigns to abolish and to preserve British colonial slavery, and so quite a few people couldn’t really understand what connected that with Impossible Monsters. But I think they’re of a piece: they’re both histories of ideas, politics, and culture in the nineteenth century, and more significantly they’re both histories of how specific ideas – whether about slavery, the age of the earth, or natural selection – were articulated, debated, accepted, and rejected. In particular, those ideas (abolitionism, evolution, etc) heralded radical change, and what has really interested me is the way in which conservative thinkers sought to resist and defeat the march of those ideas.

What advice would you give a writer of non-fiction starting out today, given the current publishing climate?

Before all else, don’t quit your day job: the market is massively
uncertain, and almost nobody can make a full-time living from writing. (This is one of the reasons that I’ve been so bewildered by the attacks on certain sponsors of literary awards and events.) Of course, that means you’ll have to do your writing in the evenings, and on weekends and holidays. That’s a lot to sacrifice, so the other key piece of advice is that you really need to be genuinely interested in your topic, and you need to enjoy the processes of researching and writing in themselves.

What’s next for you as an author?

I’m about half-way through researching and writing my next book, which will be a history of the Bavarian secret society of the Illuminati, and the conspiracy theory which has grown up around them. So yes, the Illuminati did exist: they were German-speaking philosophers and intellectuals who wanted to advance the cause of the Enlightenment, but they only lasted from 1776 to 1787. In the wake of the French Revolution, however, there took hold a conspiracy theory that the Illuminati had caused the Revolution, and the Illuminati have been a trope of political culture ever since. What I want to understand is how and why so many otherwise intelligent, credible people believed the nonsense!