How did a man given a few years to live in 1963, when diagnosed with motor neurone disease at the age of twenty-one, not only survive into his seventies, but consistently overcome a failing body to produce scientific work of the first order? Part of the answer, as Graham Farmelo shows, is that Stephen Hawking was stubborn to the point of bloody-mindedness: he hated being told what to do and was so competitive that as a child he never let his younger sister win at games (and, as an adult, he never let his own children win either). Being the cox of a college eight in Oxford suited him to a T. He decided where the boat went, gave orders to the crew and only reluctantly admitted defeat.

These characteristics did not always endear the physicist to his colleagues, and on several occasions he ruffled feathers by accepting more than his fair share of credit for a new idea, most notably in connection with the link between black holes and thermodynamics. But in person he was friendly, gregarious and generous with the encouragement he gave to his students.

Another reason Hawking could defy the medical odds was the support network he’d built up around himself. Eventually, the strain of care told on his first wife, Jane; indeed, it destroyed their marriage, and Farmelo gives us as reliable an account as we are likely to get of Hawking’s messy