On this day in 1836 HMS Beagle sailed into Plymouth after almost 5 years exploration. Aboard was a young naturalist - Charles Darwin - and his observations and conclusions have been the subject of fierce debate ever since.

Take Edmund Goss for example. His parents were both members of the religious sect known as the Plymouth Brethren. After his mother's death, he was brought up in stifling isolation by his father, an eminent naturalist and zoologist whose faith overcame his reason when confronted by Darwin's theory of evolution.

In Father and Son, which was subtitled A Study of Two Temperaments, Edmund Goss tells of his childhood which was stripped of nearly all fun by his parents' puritanical and stern religion. But interestingly, his father is presented not as a cruel, vicious, and hypocritical. Instead, he is shown as a caring parent, a completely earnest practitioner of his religion, but fanatically concerned to eliminate all activities that do not lead to increased religious devotion and moral seriousness.

Perhaps everyone has a swipe at their parents and the way they were brought up at some point in their lives, but very few are able to exact revenge to the extent that Edmund Goss did upon his father in his superbly funny, agonising account of a very strange childhood.

Geoffrey Palmer reads Father and Son in his famously lugubrious voice as an unabridged audio book for Silksoundbooks.

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