Tag Archives: biography

Moomintroll

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Reading Graham Farmelo’s Hawking: His Life and Work for the Telegraph, 14 September 2026 

Eight years have passed since the theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking died, aged 76, of complications caused by motor neurone disease. It was a condition that everyone expected would kill him in his mid-20s. Hawking faced down his gathering weakness and paralysis from a “ghastly prison,” as Graham Farmelo puts it in Hawking: His Life and Work, and from there issued, over 50 years, a stream of extraordinary intellectual accomplishments.

Hawking conducted most of his research at Cambridge University, but travelled constantly. Working at Caltech in Pasedena in the winter months were a fillip for him as his health declined. Hawking’s intellectual odyssey was launched on the idea that the universe must have had a starting point. In the midst of trying to understand this starting “singularity” to the universe — a dimensionless point from which both time and space emerged — and in eventually abandoning the idea, Hawking also, by-the-by, predicted just about everything we have since observed about black holes (and quite a bit that we haven’t). But who needs physics when you’ve got celebrity? His famous work of popular science, A Brief History of Time, was a bestseller, and broke a record for appearing on the Sunday Times charts for 237 weeks. His funeral was attended variously by Eddie Redmayne (who played him in the 2014 biopic, The Theory of Everything), Brian Cox, and, curiously, Hawking’s longtime fan Elon Musk.

No-one has ever been so crass as to suggest that either Hawking’s accomplishments, or the accolades that attached to him could ever redeem the ghastliness of his ineluctable condition. And yet they serve as a testament to the willpower of a man who doubted (and was given plentiful reason to doubt) that there is a special meaning to human life.

Hawking was born on January 8, 1942, with an ‘enormous head’ according to his mother, Isobel, and ‘one of the loudest voices I’ve ever heard.’ His sister Mary found him to be ‘one of the most self-centred people I’ve ever met.’ He stood out at St Albans School in 1952, if only for his ineptitude and physical awkwardness, and at 17 he entered University College, Oxford, where he coasted through his three-year degree by doing an average of only one hour of work a day. His friends nicknamed him Moomintroll because he was intensely excited by everything and constantly getting into scrapes. Then, in his second year, the early symptoms of his motor neurone disease began to manifest — not least a terrifying fall down a 30-foot wooden college staircase. He was so afraid he might have sustained brain damage, he took to falling asleep at night to a tape loop of his own voice endlessly reassuring him: “You are a genius.”

Hawking met his future wife, Jane Wilde, an English teacher, at a New Year’s party in 1962, just as he was beginning postgraduate research at Cambridge and shortly before he was diagnosed with ALS, the most common and least forgiving form of motor neurone disease. They married in 1965 and had three children. Hawking’s mother Isobel never felt easy about their life together. As early as 1970, and as Hawking resorted for the first time to a wheelchair, she wrote in her journal: “I don’t know whether the Stephen-Jane business is a happy defiance of the fates, or an unnatural pretence, whether there is real value in it or only a stubborn refusal to believe in the tragedy of life.”

That “stubborn refusal” led Hawking and Jane through a series of ever-evolving, ever-more dysfunctional domestic arrangements. In 1977, as Hawking’s condition deteriorated, Jane brought family friend Jonathan Hellyer Jones into the house to help her care for her husband. He became her lover, while Hawking grew ever closer to his nurse, Elaine Mason. Jane and Hawking’s parents fell out horribly.

The emotional gimcrackery of this arrangement blew up in everyone’s face once Hawking divorced Jane and married Elaine in 1995. The Sun and The Daily Mail ran sensational pieces about Elaine’s alleged abuse of her new husband, and the police even got involved (the couple strongly denied the allegations and the police dropped their investigation in 2004). When this second marriage ended in divorce, Hawking was left helpless and having to spend his nights alone — something he abhorred. Newspapers reported he fell for another of his carers, Diana King, who was 39 years his junior — but in his new biography of the man, Graham Farmelo does not give the story the time of day. He also dispatches persistent rumours around what Hawking got up to on Jeffrey Epstein’s island (nothing, because he was never there).

Even with the tittle-tattle set aside, there’s little victory to be found in Hawking’s relationships – unless and until you accept that leaving behind a messy and messed-up reputation was itself a triumphant human act. Hawking snatched at happiness, did work of consequence, screwed up his marriage, lost his edge, his good conscience and his every source of comfort, and ended up an embarrassing parody of himself: all this, at least, makes him like the rest and best of us.

Farmelo’s “authorised” biography is no snow-job. His portrait acknowledges that Hawking was never an especially nice person. Hawking was more than happy to point this out himself: in The Simpsons episode They Saved Lisa’s Brain, broadcast in May 1999, Hawking – and it really is Hawking – says to Homer, “Your theory of a doughnut-shaped universe is intriguing. I may have to steal it.” Farmelo’s access to the family archive enables him to explore several intellectual feuds over attribution, though none are what you could call juicy.

Above all, Farmelo wants us to look past Hawking the Man to understand Hawking the Project: a determined mass effort, extending across decades, to maintain one human spirit against huge physical odds. It’s clear enough why the Hawking Estate would consider Farmelo a safe pair of hands: 2009’s The Strangest Man is a stunning biography of Paul Dirac, at once one of the most important and least personally engaging physicists of the 20th century. The more pressing question is: do we need another biography? Jane already gave us Music to Move the Stars (1999) expanded eight years later into Travelling to Infinity: My Life with Stephen, which formed the basis of The Theory of Everything. More recently, in 2021, we had Charles Seife’s very good Hawking Hawking: The Selling of a Scientific Celebrity.

What can Farmelo bring to such a groaning table? He spends his early chapters dutifully paying homage to every family connection. But the book does eventually get going, and Farmelo handles Hawking’s scientific accomplishments with trademark economy and precision. His main achievement is to bring something of Isobel Hawking’s unsparing clear-sightedness to his warmly sympathetic account of Hawking’s life. Isobel refused to let her son’s scientific genius excuse his self-absorption, writing in her diary: “I suppose what in other people would just be bad manners is excusable great-mannishness in him. Certainly I should not put up with the way he treats me, if it were [done by] anyone else.”

While Farmelo’s book may not be essential, in the strictest sense, it is certainly worthwhile, and meets head-on the challenge set by a subject who, having lived an entire life under an immediate death-sentence, has already worked out its punch-line.

It was a line Stephen got so fed up repeating to people, he even pre-programmed it into his computer: “It’s not as if I had a choice and deliberately chose a difficult path,” he would say, through the machine that, after a tracheostomy in 1985, enabled him to speak. “I have just done the only thing open to me in the situation.”

The Value of Psychotic Experience

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Reading The Best Minds: A story of friendship, madness and the tragedy of good intentions by Jonathan Rosen. For the Telegraph, 3 April 2023

This is the story of the author’s lifelong friendship with Michael Laudor: his neighbour growing up in in 1970s Westchester County; his rival at Yale; and his role-model as he abandoned a lucrative job for a life of literary struggle. Through what followed — debilitating schizophrenia; law school; and national celebrity as he publicised the plight of people living with mental illness — Laudor became something of a hero for Jonathan Rosen. And in June 1998, in the grip of yet another psychotic episode, he stabbed his pregnant girlfriend to death.

Her name was Caroline Costello and, says Rosen, she would not have been the first person to ascribe everything in Laudor’s disintegration, “from surface tremors to elliptical apocalyptic utterances, to the hidden depths of a complex soul.”

It will take Rosen over 500 pages to unpick Costello and Laudor’s tragedy, but he starts (and so, then, will we) with the Beats — that generation of writers who, he says, “released madness like a fox at a hunt, then rushed after — not to help or heal but to see where it led, and to feel more alive while the chase was on.”

As a young man, the poet Alan Ginsburg (whose Beat poem “Howl” gives this book its title) gave permission for his mother’s lobotomy. He spent the rest of his life atoning for this, “spinning the culture around him,” says Rosen, “into alignment with his mother’s psychosis”. By the summer of 1968 the Esalen Institute in Big Sur was sponsoring events under the heading “The Value of Psychotic Experience”.

To the amateur dramatics of the Beat generation (who declared mental illness a myth) add the hypocrisies of neo-Marxist critics like Paul de Mann (who proved texts mean whatever we want them to mean) and Franz Fanon (for whom violence was a cleansing force with a healing property) and the half-truths of anti-psychiatrists like Felix Guattari, who hid his clinic’s use of ECT to bolster his theory that schizophrenia was a disease of capitalist culture. Stir in the naiveties of the community health movement (that judged all asylums prisons), and policies ushered in by Jack Kennedy’s Community Mental Health Act of 1963 (“predicated,” says Rosen, “on the promise of cures that did not exist, preventions that remained elusive, and treatments that only work for those who were able to comply”); and you will begin to understand the sheer enormity of the doom awaiting Laudor and those he loved, once the 1980s had “backed up an SUV” over the ruins of America’s mental health provision.

This is a tragedy that enters wearing the motley of farce: on leaving Yale, Laudor became a management consultant, hired by the multinational firm Bain & Co. Rosen reckons Laudor got the job by talking with authority even when he didn’t know what he was talking about; “That, in fact, was why they had hired him.”

By the time Laudor enters Yale Law School, however, his progressive disintegration is clear enough to the reader (if not to the Dean of the school, Guido Calabresi, besotted with the way an understanding of mental health could, in Rosen’s words, “undermine the authority of courts, laws, facts, and judges, by exposing the irrational nature of the human mind”).

Soon Michael is being offered a million dollars for his memoir and another million for the movie rights. He’s the poster child for every American living with mental illness, and at the same time, he’s an all-American success story: proof that the human spirit can win out over psychiatric neglect.

Only it didn’t.

No one knows what to do about schizophrenia. The treatments don’t work, except sometimes they do, and when they do, no-one can really say why.

Rosen’s book is a devastating attack on a generation that refused to look this hard truth in the eye, and turned it, instead into some sort of flattering sociopolitical metaphor, and in so doing, deprived desperate people of care.

Rosen’s book is the mea culpa of a man who now understands that “the revolution in consciousness I hoped would free my mind… came at the expense of people whose mental pain I could not begin to fathom.”

It’s the darkest of literary triumphs, and the most gripping of unbearable reads.

Pluck

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Reading Gunpowder and Glory: The Explosive Life of Frank Brock OBE by Harry Smee and Henry Macrory for the Spectator, 21 March 2020

Early one morning in October 1874, a barge carrying three barrels of benzoline and five tons of gunpowder blew up in the Regent’s Canal, close to London Zoo. The crew of three were killed outright, scores of houses were badly damaged, the explosion could be heard 25 miles away, and “dead fish rained from the sky in the West End.”

This is a book about the weird, if obvious, intersection between firework manufacture and warfare. It is, ostensibly, the biography of a hero of the First World War, Frank Brock. And if it were the work of more ambitious literary hands, Brock would have been all you got. His heritage, his school adventures, his international career as a showman, his inventions, his war work, his violent death. Enough for a whole book, surely?

But Gunpowder and Glory is not a “literary” work, by which I mean it is neither self-conscious nor overwrought. Instead Henry Macrory (who anyway has already proved his literary chops with his 2018 biography of the swindler Whitaker Wright) has opted for what looks like a very light touch here, assembling and ordering the anecdotes and reflections of Frank Brock’s grandson Harry Smee about his family, their business as pyrotechnical artists, and, finally, about Frank, his illustrious forebear.

I suspect a lot of sweat went into such artlessness, and it’s paid off, creating a book that reads like fascinating dinner conversation. Reading its best passages, I felt I was discovering Brock the way Harry had as a child, looking into his mother’s “ancient oak chests filled with papers, medals, newspapers, books, photographs, an Intelligence-issue knuckleduster and pieces of Zeppelin and Zeppelin bomb shrapnel.”

For eight generations, the Brock family produced pyrotechnic spectaculars of a unique kind. Typical set piece displays in the eighteenth century included “Jupiter discharging lightning and thunder, Two gladiators combating with fire and sword, and Neptune finely carv’d seated in his chair, drawn by two sea horses on fire-wheels, spearing a dolphin.”

Come the twentieth century, Brock’s shows were a signature of Empire. It would take a write like Thomas Pynchon to do full justice to “a sixty foot-high mechanical depiction of the Victorian music-hall performer, Lottie Collins, singing the chorus of her famous song ‘Ta-ra-ra-boom-de-ay’ and giving a spirited kick of an automated leg each time the word ‘boom’ rang out.”

Frank was a Dulwich College boy, and one of that generation lost to the slaughter of the Great War. A spy and an inventor — James Bond and Q in one — he applied his inherited chemical and pyrotechnical genius to the war effort — by making a chemical weapon. It wasn’t any good, though: Jellite, developed during the summer of 1915 and named after its jelly-like consistency during manufacture, proved insufficiently lethal.

On such turns of chance do reputations depend, since we remember Frank Brock for his many less problematic inventions. Dover flares burned for seven and a half minutes
and lit up an area of three miles radius, as Winston Churchill put it, “as bright as Piccadilly”. U boats, diving to avoid these lights, encountered mines. Frank’s artificial fogs, hardly bettered since, concealed whole British fleets, entire Allied battle lines.

Then there are his incendiary bullets.

At the time of the Great War a decent Zeppelin could climb to 20,000 feet, travel at 47 mph for more than 1,000 miles, and stay aloft for 36 hours. Smee and Mcrory are well within their rights to call them “the stealth bombers of their time”.

Brock’s bullets tore them out of the sky. Sir William Pope, Brock’s advisor, and a professor of chemistry at Cambridge University, explained: “You need to imagine a bullet proceeding at several thousand feet a second, and firing as it passes through a piece of fabric which is no thicker than a pocket handkerchief.” All to rupture a gigantic sac of hydrogen sufficiently to make the gas explode. (Much less easy than you think; the Hindenburg only crashed because its entire outer envelope was set on fire.)

Frank died in an assault on the mole at Zeebrugge in 1918. He shouldn’t have been there. He should have been in a lab somewhere, cooking up another bullet, another light, another poison gas. Today, he surely would be suitably contained, his efforts efficiently channeled, his spirit carefully and surgically broken.

Frank lived at a time when it was possible — and men, at any rate, were encouraged — to be more than one thing. That this heroic idea overreached itself — that rugby field and school chemistry lab both dissolved seamlessly into the Somme — needs no rehearsing.

Still, we have lost something. When Frank went to school there was a bookstall near the station which sold “a magazine called Pluck, containing ‘the daring deeds of plucky sailors, plucky soldiers, plucky firemen, plucky explorers, plucky detectives, plucky railwaymen, plucky boys and plucky girls and all sorts of conditions of British heroes’.”

Frank was a boy moulded thus, and sneer as much as you want, we will not see his like again.

 

Albert Hofmann vs The West

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New Scientist sent me down the LSD rabbit-hole recently in pursuit of its discoverer, Albert Hofmann. The subs did a cracking job as usual; but here’s the  unwound version for those who have the time.

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Image swiped from Leonard Freed/Magnum

A cloud of scorn fogs our understanding of LSD. It is justified. Those who fear The Man may remember the murderous human experiments conducted for the CIA’s MK-Ultra programme. Those who deplore social breakdown will recall Timothy Leary’s plan for young Americans to “turn on, tune in, drop out” – fuelled by his insouciant purchase order, in 1963, for one million doses of LSD and 2.5 million doses of psilocybine.

What of the substance itself, and the Swiss chemist who invented it, Albert Hofmann? In March this year, Hofmann’s own memoir, LSD: my problem child, was published by the Beckley Foundation Press in association with the OUP, in a new translation by Jonathan Ott. At once stiff as a board and lush as a jungle, Ott’s translation neatly captures the romance of Hofmann’s discovery. LSD provides the capstone for  a grand European project to explore the psyche, begun by Goethe, developed by Purkinje and Mach,  von Helmholtz and Exner, and obliterated by the rise of National Socialism in Germany. LSD is also the foundation of modern popular culture, inspiring everything from the personal computer to Gaia theory. For this reason, all writings about LSD are unavoidably – often comically – anachronistic. Whole pages of Hofmann’s own, deeply felt and beautifully written memoir could be dropped wholesale into a Thomas Pynchon novel with no-one any the wiser.

In an attempt to bring the LSD story up to date in time for the seventieth anniversary of its discovery,  two of Hoffman’s close acquaintances, Dieter Hagenbach and Lucius Werthmüller, have assembled a copiously illustrated volume of stories, biographies, memoirs and reflections. Mystic Chemist is the sort of mess you get when your aspiration gets ahead of your writing time. Its by-the-numbers approach contains spadefuls of trivia of the  “Mexico is the fifth largest country on the American continent” variety. It is horrible. It is also touching, sad and angry. And – so long as it’s not the first book a reader picks up about LSD – it is pretty much indispensable.

LSD is a psychiatric and medical tool. Not a medicine, since it tends to reinforce a person’s prevailing mood. Not a recreational substance: it triggers a psychosis, still poorly understood, that exposes to consciousness, and temporarily deconstructs, the processes by which a self maintains itself. Psychedelics were used as a spiritual aid for millennia, before falling as collateral damage in the West’s “war on drugs”. But regret at such a profound cultural loss cannot but be tempered by the thought that Greece, powered by the Eleusinian mysteries, still succumbed to decline, and Mexico, in its psilocybine haze, is a violent and impoverished political backwater. LSD does not harm people; nor does it make humanity evolve. The fault is not in LSD but in ourselves, says Hofmann: in “hypermaterialism, alienation from Nature through industrialisation and increasing urbanisation, lack of satisfaction with professional employment in an increasingly mechanised, lifeless, workaday world, ennui and purposelessness in a wealthy, oversaturated society, and the utter lack of a religious, nurturing, and meaningful philosophical foundation for life.”