In the Review’s February 12 issue Jenny Uglow enters the “glamorous,” “luminescent,” “spectacular,” “dashing,” “superrich,” “witty and odd,” “high-society pirate’s chest” world of precious gemstones. Starting at a lavish exhibition of some of the treasures of Maison Cartier’s nearly 180-year history of jewelry design, Uglow takes readers from the “many-layered necklace and headpiece of emeralds and diamonds for the maharaja of Patiala” and “a jeweled sarpech…whose feathers of baguette-cut diamonds float up from a great golden-hued ‘tobacco’ stone known as the Tiger’s Eye diamond” to a “scholarly study of gems in the history of European science” by the historian Michael Bycroft, littering the path along the way with emeralds, rubies, diamonds, and pearls. Since 2010 Uglow has written numerous essays for the Review, often on the history of science—on subjects ranging from “the stout, wheezing, pioneering doctor Thomas Beddoes, founder of the Pneumatic Institution” to weather forecasting to volcanoes—but also on Waterloo, Lucian Freud, Quentin Blake, the invention of manners, Kew gardens, and Hilary Mantel. She is the author of a similarly catholic array of books, …