I think you would be amused if you were here now to see my lectures – in my elementary one I have got a front row entirely consisting of young women (some of them not so young neither, as someone says in Jeames' Diary) and they take notes in the most painstaking and praiseworthy fashion, but the most extraordinary thing is that I have got one at my advanced lecture. I am afraid she does not understand a word and my theory is that she is attending my lectures on the supposition that they are Divinity and she has not yet found out her mistake.

Professor J. J. Thomson to Mrs H. F. Reid, 4 November 1886

When Joseph John Thomson used this light-hearted description to brighten up a letter to a family friend, women had been attending physics lectures at the Cavendish Laboratory for four years. Though the picture was designed to amuse the recipient, a married woman, joviality thinly disguised unease. Thomson's previously homogeneous audience had been physically split into two opposing sections with young, male students at the back and older, female students along the front row. Intellectual divisions were also apparent; the women took notes in a different, non-male way, and without the sharpness of a masculine mind they could not understand the content. The message was plain – the women had made a mistake. Their infiltration had been unsuccessful and they did not fit in.

Much ink has been spilt in consideration of the once pervasive reliance on military metaphors to depict the relationships between science and religion in the nineteenth century. This has resulted in historically sensitive treatments of secularization; and the realization that the relationship between science and religion was not a bloody war between intellectual nation states, but a protracted divorce of former partners. Moreover, historians of science have been encouraged to throw off the yoke of the internalism–externalism debate, and to explore the cultural boundaries that impinged upon practitioners of a natural knowledge of the world. Within the historiography of nineteenth-century science, this has resulted in many new perspectives on science and natural knowledge in relation to cultural control and authority.

According to articles and books published at the end of the nineteenth century, the introduction of photography to astronomy was one of the most notable events in the discipline in a period chock full of important inventions and amazing discoveries. Edward Holden, director of the Lick Observatory in California, between 1887 and 1898, was rapturous about the promise of photography: it would simplify astronomical observation, increase the reliability of data and produce permanent records of the heavens untainted by distraction, ill discipline or bias. This would happen, he argued, because of the mechanical virtues of the camera:

It does not tire, as the eye does, and refuse to pay attention for more than a small fraction of a section, but it will faithfully record every ray of light that falls upon it even for hours and finally it will produce its automatic register [ctdot ] [that] can be measured, if necessary, again and again. The permanence of the records is of the greatest importance, and so far as we know it is complete [ctdot ] We can hand down to our successors a picture of the sky, locked in a box.

The controversy between Alfred Werner and Sophus Mads Jørgensen over the structure of complex inorganic compounds is not among the best known of the many controversies in the history of chemistry, but it is one of the most thoroughly described in the historical literature. This is due almost solely to the works of George Kauffman, the distinguished American historian of chemistry and specialist in the history of coordination chemistry. Kauffman has described and analysed almost every aspect of the development of coordination chemistry and has in several works dealt with the Werner–Jørgensen controversy which ran from 1894 to 1899. Because of Kauffman's expertise and many works in the area, his account is likely to be taken as authoritative and his conclusions repeated in later historical works. This paper argues that this is unwarranted at least in one particular respect, namely the evaluation of Jørgensen and the way the controversy terminated. Kauffman's version of this episode has frequently appeared in print during a period of thirty-five years, first in 1959 and most recently in 1994. My conclusion is that it cannot survive critical examination.

The editing of the correspondence of major figures in intellectual history is an essential scholarly activity. Yet in this country in recent years it has neither been the priority it should be, nor has it received the support that it deserves. Of course there have been exceptions to this, perhaps notably – for the early modern period – the epic one-man effort of Esmond de Beer in his later years in producing The Correspondence of John Locke (though this regrettably, and frustratingly, lacks a composite index). A further exception, the edition of The Correspondence of Henry Oldenburg by A. R. and M. B. Hall, was unfortunately flawed by the need to change publishers midway in the series, which has led to a marked disparity in the availability of the latter part of the set compared with its early volumes. In any case, like the Locke edition, this was conceived in the heady days of the 1960s and early 1970s, and few have ventured such enterprises since. Virtually the only exception is Noel Malcolm's edition of the manageable-sized Correspondence of Thomas Hobbes (two volumes, 1994). Moreover, it is revealing of the acute need to justify the publication of such material felt by editors and publishers alike that the promotional leaflet for this edition went so far as to claim that it was ‘one of the most important scholarly publications of the twentieth century’ – a claim that is the more ironic in view of the quite significant shortcomings in its method of presenting the material that it contains.

Despite the alarming drop in numbers of students studying science throughout the Western world today there is no more important subject in our time than science broadly construed, and these three books provide some of the reasons. Their diversity indicates the shape of the debates occurring about the scientist in Western culture, science's tortured philosophical realism and representation as troubled categories, and, most predictably, life on the screen in the age of the Internet.