Henry Gee
A Soldier & a Scientist
A Dominant Character: The Radical Science and Restless Politics of J B S Haldane
By Samanth Subramanian
Atlantic 400pp £20
If you were looking for a model protagonist for a ripping yarn, you could do a lot worse than John Burdon Sanderson Haldane, known to his colleagues as JBS, his intimates as Jack and his father as Boy. He was born in 1892, when the British Empire was in its pomp. The Haldanes could trace their ancestry back to the 12th century, when the ‘Half-Danes’ held a strategic pass north of Edinburgh. Although they lived in Oxford, the Haldanes summered at an ancestral pile in Scotland, where Jack and his adoring sister, Naomi (best known as the novelist Naomi Mitchison), ran wild in the woods and fields.
Jack’s uncle was the Liberal politician R B Haldane. His father, John Scott Haldane, was a pioneering physiologist who had a laboratory at home and was often called on by the government to offer advice on air quality. Jack was encouraged to participate in experiments, some of them deliciously dangerous. In those days, scientists were wont to experiment on themselves. In the case of Haldane senior, that also meant his son. This could involve being sent to the bottom of a freezing loch to test breathing equipment. ‘To Jack, this was all a screaming adventure,’ Samanth Subramanian writes. Although Jack and Naomi would do experiments together, including breeding mice and guinea pigs to test ideas of inheritance, their father included only Jack in his more wizard wheezes.
Jack went to the Dragon School, then Eton and Oxford, where, despite his healthy interest in science, he studied mathematics and, just because it was there, classics. Rebellious, awkward, ebullient and fearsomely clever, he read everything and forgot nothing: well into later life he could reel off, from memory, classical
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
Twitter Feed
Of the siblings Gwen and Augustus John, it is Augustus who has commanded most attention from collectors and connoisseurs.
Was he really the finer artist, asks Tanya Harrod, or is it time Gwen emerged from her brother’s shadow?
Tanya Harrod - Cut from the Same Canvas
Tanya Harrod: Cut from the Same Canvas - Artists, Siblings, Visionaries: The Lives and Loves of Gwen and Augustus John by Judith Mackrell
literaryreview.co.uk
As Apple has grown, one country above all has proved able to supply the skills and capacity it needs: China.
What compromises has Apple made in its pivot east? @carljackmiller investigates.
Carl Miller - Return of the Mac
Carl Miller: Return of the Mac - Apple in China: The Capture of the World’s Greatest Company by Patrick McGee
literaryreview.co.uk
We are saddened to hear of the death of Edmund White.
We've lifted the paywall on Richard Davenport-Hines's 2014 review of White's Paris memoir.
Richard Davenport-Hines - Scenes from a Literary Life
Richard Davenport-Hines: Scenes from a Literary Life - Inside a Pearl: My Years in Paris by Edmund White
literaryreview.co.uk