It would be impossible to write a dull biography of James Lovelock – as is confirmed by this welcome book by Jonathan Watts, global environment editor at The Guardian, who variously describes Lovelock as a world-class chemist and a ‘mini-Q … almost certainly Britain’s longest-­serving spy’.

The Science Museum, a childhood inspiration for Lovelock, in 2012 acquired his archive, which provides much material for this biography. Having dealt with Lovelock since the early 1990s until just before his death on his 103rd birthday, I was fascinated by how Watts recasts key aspects of his life.

We learn about Lovelock’s efforts to find life on Mars, his invention of the electron capture detector (ECD), which revealed that pollution was a global problem, and his hugely influential idea that Earth is a self-regulating system. Called the Gaia hypothesis, it was initially ridiculed as new-age nonsense, but his