“Excellent…From the opening pages, which relate the occasion when Shirley MacLaine sought an audience with her hero in a Cambridge restaurant, to the final chapter ‘Hollywood, Fame and Fortune’, the book is well-nigh unputdownable…It ought to be read alongside A Brief History of Time as a kind of explanatory supplement” Heather Couper.” The Times Educational Supplement

“Intriguing…There are larger questions here than the life of this singular man…We are on the brink here of a mystery as great as that of an extraordinary man whose mind and imagination have soared beyond the disabling confines of the flesh” Peter Ackroyd, The Times

“Admirable… What makes this book so rewarding is the way that the authors have blended their account of Hawking’s science with that of his life, giving us a picture of a remarkable scientist as a remarkable person” The Spectator

“It’s compulsive reading, maybe because Hawking towers above it all, a complex and fascinating character who remains strangely elusive: boyish yet indomitable, stubborn yet charming, a private man revelling in fame” Clare Alexander, The Sunday Times.

“Few scientists become legends in their own lifetime. Stephen Hawking is one. It is good to have this well-documented and immensely readable biography to remind us that the media-hyped ‘mute genius in the wheelchair’ is in fact a sensitive, humorous, ambitious and occasionally wilful human being” Paul Davies, The Times Higher Educational Supplement.

“Excellent… one of the best biographies of the year” Birmingham News (USA)

“Fascinating… Our taste for wonder is well catered for.” Anthony Burgess, The Observer

“A successful merger of biography and physics… As it traces the course of Hawking’s life, it pauses occasionally to prepare the reader for the mind-boggling complexities of relative theory and even the most bizarre notions of quantum physics… The exercise works. By the time the higher elevations are reached, such strange notions as Einsteinian curved space-time and the quantum uncertainty principle, heavy meals indeed, seem not so difficult to digest.” Time