In this memoir, Oliver Sacks evokes, with warmth and wit, his upbringing in wartime England, telling of the large science-steeped family who fostered his early fascination with chemistry. There follow his years at boarding school where, though unhappy, he developed the intellectual curiosity that would shape his later life. And we hear of his return to London, an emotionally bereft 10-year-old who found solace in his passion for learning. 'Uncle Tungsten' radiates all the delight and wonder of a boy's adventures, and provides an unforgettable portrait of an extraordinary young mind.

It was over thirty years ago that Georke Mikes wrote How to be an Alien, the classic vade mecum for foreigners in Britain. The book became required reading for the alien, and an indispensable aid to self-understanding for the native. It is a heavy responsibility to be acknowledged as the leading expert on a subject as tricky as the British. For one thing, even they can change a good deal in thirty years. In acknowledgement of this, Mr Mikes has felt bound to write a new guide. At the heart of the book are the important sections on How to Lose an Empire, Become a Colony, and Stop Being an Island. All these themes are brand new. Others are familiar, but required new treatment. Sex could no longer be despatched in the shortest chapter known to literature (ten words) but called for at least a page (Britons whose self-confidence is wobbly had better skip it). The art of getting lost in London has become infinitely more complex than it was, and what is happening to the language is hair-raising. But the native will find that although his self-esteem takes some hard knocks, he ends in a glow of self-congratulation. It seems that when Great Britain finally becomes a desert island it will have its Robinson Crusoe in the shape of George Mikes. Amid all the changes two things remain the same: Nicholas Bentley is still the perfect illustrator for George Mikes's wit, and a special chemistry still exists between Mikes and his adopted country. The chemistry produced the most famous of all his works, and now it has produced the book to rival it.

Selected by his daughter, Vivien, from Max Perutz's voluminous correspondence, the letters reproduced here portray their author with a spontaneity and directness no autobiography could have matched. They chronicle Perutz's adventurous life through his own vivid, erudite and humorous pen, documenting the hopes, roadblocks and moments of elation of his sixty-year quest to understand the molecular biology of hemoglobin. The first great step in this quest ― unraveling the molecular structure of hemoglobin ― earned Perutz the 1962 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. Narrated against a backdrop of family and friends, politics and war, literature, travels, and Max's beloved mountains, these letters provide rare insight into the thoughts of a remarkable and very human scientist, and delightful sketches of some of the people he encountered. Starting with lively letters to a girlfriend written in his youth in Vienna and the impressions of a young scientist in Cambridge, the letters progress to the desperate pleas of an "enemy alien" interned in Canada during World War II. The diary of Perutz's subsequent super-secret war work for the British to build a floating ice airstrip in the North Atlantic, ardent campaigning letters to scientists and politicians, and self-deprecating stories of his own mishaps written to amuse his children and grandchildren are some of the many highlights of these fascinating letters, unique in the annals of recent scientific history. This book is a companion to Georgina Ferry's Max Perutz and the Secret of Life. Together these volumes provide a portrait of an extraordinary character in the development of molecular biology.