This is a gripping and highly informative biography which carries the reader along comfortably in its easy and witty narrative style, painting the essential background, without distracting from the main thesis: that there are many facets to the man Newton, and those which we traditionally herald, his laws, his mathematical tools, his discoveries in the fields of gravity and light, all of which make an unequalled contribution to the launch of empirical science, he himself allowed to be eclipsed in his own mind by greater passions - for alchemy and occult mysticism.

It is also a case study of how history is all too often a retrospective process of selectivity in compliance to the historian's own paradigm's need set. What the reader can gain from this tome of academic excellence is an intimacy with the thinking and logic of a society weaning itself painfully and fitfully out of superstition and intellectual straitjackets. And how Newton was very much a product of this society and how much more marvellous his achievements were as a result.

This book is a must for anyone serious about understanding not only science and mathematics, but how remarkable it happened when and how it did. Read this book and realise there was nothing inevitable about our heritage.