knowledge or our taste in music, the details of their lives never go out of date. It would be churlish not to mention www.wikipedia.com. For all its unevenness and flaws, it is an invaluable tool that will only grow in usefulness the more of us who use it.
Wherever possible we have tried to indicate editions of books that are still in print.
1 There’s Nothing Like a Bad Start in Life
Leonardo da Vinci
Charles Nicholl, Leonardo da Vinci: The Flights of the Mind (Allen Lane, 2004)
Leonardo da Vinci, The Notebooks (Profile, 2005)
Sigmund Freud
Sigmund Freud,The Penguin Freud Reader, ed. Adam Phillips (Penguin, 2006)
Peter Gay, Freud: A Life in Our Time (W. W. Norton & Co., 1998)
Isaac Newton
James Gleick, Isaac Newton (Fourth Estate, 2003)
Thomas Levenson, Newton and the Counterfeiter (Faber, 2009)
Oliver Heaviside
Basil Mahon, Oliver Heaviside: Maverick Mastermind of Electricity (Institution of Engineering and Technology, 2009)
Paul J. Nahin, Oliver Heaviside: The Life, Work and Times of an Electrical Genius of the Victorian Age, new ed. (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002)
Lord Byron
Ashley Hay, The Secret: The Strange Marriage of Annabella Milbanke and Lord Byron (Aurum, 2001)
Fiona McCarthy, Byron: Life & Legend (Faber, 2003)
Ada Lovelace
Betty O’Toole, Ada, the Enchantress of Numbers: A Selection from the Letters of Lord Byron’s Daughter and Her Description of the First Computer (Pickering & Chatto, 1992)
Benjamin Woolley, The Bride of Science: Romance, Reason and Byron’s Daughter (Macmillan, 1999)
Hans Christian Andersen
Jens Andersen, Hans Christian Andersen (Duckworth, 2005)
Jackie Wullschlager, Hans Christian Andersen: The Life of a Storyteller (Allen Lane, 2000)
Salvador Dali
Salvador Dali, The Secret Life of Salvador Dali, tr. Haakon Chevalier (Dover Publications, 2009)
Ian Gibson, The Shameful Life of Salvador Dali (Faber, 1997)
Epicurus
Epicurus, The Epicurus Reader: Selected Writings and Testimonia, tr. Brad Inwood and Lloyd P. Gerson (Hackett Publishing Co., 1994)
Benjamin Franklin
H. W. Brands, The Life and Times of Benjamin Franklin (Doubleday, 2000)
Benjamin Franklin, Autobiography & Other Writings, ed. Ormond Seavey (Oxford, 1993)
Edward Jenner
John Baron, The Life of Edward Jenner (London, 1827)
Richard B. Fisher, Edward Jenner 1749–1823 (Andre Deutsch, 1991)
Mary Seacole
Jane Robinson, Mary Seacole: The Charismatic Black Nurse Who Became a Heroine of the Crimea (Constable & Robinson, 2005)
Mary Seacole, The Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands, new ed. (Penguin, 2005)
Moll Cutpurse
R. Sanders, Newgate Calendar or Malefactor’s Bloody Register (London, 1760)
Janet Todd and Elizabeth Spearing, Counterfeit Ladies (New York University Press, 1994)
Richard Feynman
Richard Feynman, Surely You’re Joking Mr. Feynman!: Adventures of a Curious Character (W. W. Norton & Co., 1985)
James Gleick, Genius: Richard Feynman & Modern Physics (Little, Brown, 1992)
Richard Leighton, Tuva or Bust!: Richard Feynman’s Last Journey (W. W. Norton & Co., 1991)
Robert E. Peary
Fergus Fleming, Ninety Degrees North: The Quest for the North Pole (Granta, 2001)
Jean Malaurie, Ultima Thule: Explorers and Natives in the Polar North (W. W. Norton & Co., 2003)
Josephine Peary, My Arctic Journal: A Year among Ice-fields and Eskimos, new ed. (Cooper Square Press, 2002)
Mary Kingsley
Dea Birkett, Mary Kingsley: Imperial Adventuress (Palgrave Macmillan, 1992)
Katherine Frank, Voyager Out: The Life of Mary Kingsley (Houghton Mifflin, 1986)
Mary H. Kingsley, Travels in West Africa, new ed. (National Geographic, 2002)
Alexander von Humboldt
Alexander von Humboldt, Personal Narrative: Of a Journey to the Equinoctial Regions of the New Continent, new ed. (abridged), tr. Jason Wilson (Penguin, 2006)
N. A. Rupke, Alexander von Humboldt: A Metabiography (Chicago University Press, 2008)
Francis Galton
Martin Brookes, Extreme Measures: The Dark Visions and Bright Ideas of Francis Galton (Bloomsbury, 2004)
Francis Galton, Hereditary Genius: An Inquiry into Its Laws and Consequences,
