She also writes with an elegance and a wit you don’t generally associate with history books. It’s a clever device that brings many otherwise disparate themes and stories together. To do this she structures her book around a painting by William Hogarth, executed after Newton’s death, in which a marble bust of the great man looks down on a drawing room full of his friends, associates and proteges. She is not just writing about Newton, she is painting a portrait of the age in which he lived, worked, schmoozed and manoeuvred. Life after gravity: Isaac Newton's London Career by Patricia Fara (OUP £25, 288pp) Fara, who is a historian of science at Cambridge, has been rather ambitious here. But that’s the biographer’s burden in a nutshell. When she tells you about one or other cache of letters being burnt, you can almost hear her gnashing her teeth in frustration. There are many gaps in this story, because too much time has passed. Newton actually claimed to have been a virgin all his life, and we haven’t a clue whether that is true. Too much privation, he warned, ‘brings men to a sort of distraction & madnesse so as to make them think they have visions conversing with ’em and sitting upon their knees.’ I bet he was breathing heavily when he wrote that. One reason he hated Roman Catholics so much is that he thought the self-denial of their monks served only to inflame desire. She does talk a little, though, about him being ‘plagued with thoughts of sexual sin’. Gay activists often claim Newton as one of their own, but Fara just says, ‘Was Newton gay? is the wrong question to ask,’ and then explains why she is not going to ask it, let alone answer it. Newton (pictured) never married and swore to sexual abstinence, insisting he was a virgin all his life, but he was tortured by obsessive sexual thoughts About men or women? Fara doesn’t know, and she’s too careful to speculate. Newton never married and swore to sexual abstinence, but he was tortured by obsessive sexual thoughts. The smell of the river was bad enough the smell of the animals was worse. When he was working at the Tower of London, where the Mint was located, the building was also a prison, the HQ of the Board of Ordnance and a zoo. Often he managed both.įara’s story is full of colour: her subject had an eventful life. He tried to destroy your life and your career. If Newton didn’t like you, he didn’t just seethe impotently. He used to play backgammon with John Flamsteed, the first Astronomer Royal, but they fell out over the ownership of astronomical readings that Flamsteed had made, and friendship swiftly declined to bitter enmity. He was generous to friends and relatives, constantly handing out money, but a vicious feuder.įara describes him as a ‘serial slanderer: as soon he had vanquished one opponent, he moved on to the next.’ He had a Lincolnshire accent throughout his life. ![]() He did once go to the opera but walked out after the second act. Newton had no interest in literature or art, other than commissioning portraits and busts of himself. Fara said England’s greatest physicist (pictured) of the 17th century would ruin the lives or careers (often both) of people that he didn't like
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