Desmond Bernal was one of the greatest scientists of the 20th century. He was a pioneer of X-ray crystallography, which he believed could be applied to the study of ‘life’; he helped lay the foundations of molecular biology; and through his work in Cambridge and at Birkbeck College, London he inspired a generation of pupils, including Dorothy Hodgkin, to great discoveries and Nobel prizes. He helped plan the Normandy landings; he was a near-omniscient amateur historian, a penetrating art critic, a serial philanderer, charmer, wit and — alas, alas — unrepentant Soviet apologist, a Stalinist ‘tanky’ through and beyond the invasion of Hungary in 1956.

Bernal’s was, to put it mildly, a ‘20th- century life’; and in Andrew Brown, a doctor by profession, he has found a biographer able to explain the importance of his scientific work in lucid terms, but one who brings an unblinking diagnostic eye to the public activities. To read this book is almost to relive the European intellectual life of the last century.

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