Brief Lives 3 - Newton

Description

The third brilliant short biography in Peter Ackroyd's Brief Lives. Newton is a companion volume to Chaucer and Turner. Isaac Newton (1642-1727), the English genius, made his greatest contributions to original thought before the age of twenty-five, while at home in Lincolnshire escaping the great plague of 1665, a period of which he wrote- 'I was in the prime of age for invention.' Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge, an MP, Master of the Mind and President of the Royal Society, Newton, the author of Principia, one of the most important books in the history of science, was fascinated by calculus, the planets and the 'laws of motion', and, in keeping with his age, blurred the borders between natural philosophy and speculation- he was as passionate about astrology as astronomy and dabbled in alchemy, while his religious faith was never undermined by his scientific reasoning. Peter Ackroyd brings this somewhat puritanical man to life and demonstrates the unique brilliance of his perceptions, which changed our world forever.

Peter Ackroyd is an award-winning historian, biographer, novelist, poet and broadcaster. He is the author of the acclaimed non-fiction bestsellers London- The Biography, Thames- Sacred River and London Under; biographies of figures including Charles Dickens, William Blake, Charlie Chaplin and Alfred Hitchcock; and a multi-volume history of England. He has won the Whitbread Biography Award, the Royal Society of Literature's William Heinemann Award, the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, the Guardian Fiction Prize, the Somerset Maugham Award and the South Bank Prize for Literature. He holds a CBE for services to literature.

A terrific piece of work ... this is a wonderfully writerly book, never less than elegant in construction and execution -- Marcus Berkmann * Spectator * Written in splendidly elastic prose, each sentence a springboard for the next, it provides a concise, fair and highly readable biography of a singular genius -- Nigel Hawkes * The Times * Beautifully written and engaging -- Allan Chapman * BBC History * Ackroyd has a fine eye for the intimate, thorny details that breathe life into biographies * Herald *