“I SHALL attack chemistry, like a shark,” wrote Coleridge in a letter of 1800. Fascinated by the personality of Humphry Davy, he fell in love with science, an activity that he declared had in common with poetry the need to be performed with the passion of hope.

Richard Holmes, biographer of Coleridge, is perfectly equipped to explore the brief marriage of science and the Romantic imagination at the start of the 19th century. The Age of Wonder (HarperPress, £25/offer £22.50), a splendid plum pudding of a book for the long post-prandial watches of the Christmas season, does not disappoint. Holmes's book celebrates a period when the wonders of nature could as well be expressed by an experiment or an observation as in a poem.

Poets soon fell out of love with science, all the worse for them. But science still inspires some wonderful writing. Richard Fortey, author of Dry Store Room No 1 (HarperPerennial, £8.99/£8.54), has written a love letter to the great terracotta monster on Cromwell Road, the Natural History Museum. He spent a career there as a palaeontologist and describes the place with the intimacy of a lover and the precision of a novelist. His job description was to undertake work on fossil arthropods, but might as well, he writes, have been “Amuse yourself - for money”. Museums are not always the happiest of places to work (witness Sir Roy Strong's account of his years at the V&A) but Fortey seems to have revelled in every minute. The subject might sound as dry as the store room of its title, but don't be misled. This book is peopled by odd specimens, deftly skewered on a butterfly-collector's pin - and that's just the staff.

A new edition of Gray's Anatomy, the 40th, has been published to celebrate the title's 150th anniversary. Ruth Richardson, in The Making of Mr Gray's Anatomy (OUP, £16.99/ £15.29), has turned an historian's eye on its beginnings and unearthed some grubby behaviour. Gray, it seems, made late changes to the title page to diminish the role of his collaborator, Henry Vandyke Carter, who drew the all-important illustrations. Nor was Gray's text entirely his own, borrowing as it did great chunks of earlier books without acknowledgement. But it is hard to feel too angry at poor Gray, who died of smallpox at the age of only 34, within three years of publication of his bestseller, and on the verge of getting the surgical appointment he craved. What price immortality when mortality is so pressing?

Catharine Arnold clearly has a Gothic imagination of Brontë dimensions. Fresh from writing about London's dead in Necropolis, her new tale of madness Bedlam: London and its Mad (Simon & Schuster, £14.99/ £13.49) interweaves the history of the Bethlem Hospital with that of changing attitudes towards the insane. Bethlem was mostly a ghastly place, home to the violent, the depressed and the simply dotty, such as Margaret Nicholson, who tried to kill George III with a cake knife. (Its former building now houses the Imperial War Museum, by the way.)

Just time to mention one unmissable title, Ben Goldacre's Bad Science (Fourth Estate, £12.99/ £11.69). Laying about himself in a froth of entirely justified indignation, Goldacre slams the mountebanks and bullshitters who misuse science. Few escape: drug companies, self-styled nutritionists, deluded researchers and journalists all get thoroughly duffed up. It is enormously enjoyable, but thank heavens there isn't an index.

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