Of all the extraordinary Victorian travelogues, The Malay Archipelago has a fair claim to be the greatest – both as a beautiful, alarming, vivid and gripping account of some eight years’ travel across the entire Malay world – from Singapore to the western edges of New Guinea – and as the record of a great mind. As Wallace, often under conditions of terrible hardship and sickness, battles through jungles, lives with headhunters, and collects beetles, butterflies and birds-of-paradise, he makes discoveries about the workings of biology that have shaped our view of the world ever since.