鈥淚鈥檓 an avid reader,鈥� says Lisa Jardine, director of the AHRB Research Centre for Editing Lives and Letters at London鈥檚 Queen Mary and Westfield College. Despite being chair of judges for the 2002 Booker Prize for Fiction, she still finds time to feed her non-fiction addiction.
She has just read and loved Brenda Maddox鈥檚 Rosalind Franklin (HarperCollins), which is a serious, full-length biography of the unsung heroine of the discovery of DNA. As good scientific biographies always do, it gave some startling insights into her chosen field, crystallography, as well as the buccaneering Crick-Watson partnership that gave us modern genetics.
For contrast she turned to Rachel Holmes鈥檚 Scanty Particulars (Viking), the biography of James Barry, a shadowy medical figure who was one of the first successful practitioners of Caesarean section (in other words where both mother and baby survived). Barry鈥檚 life was one long puzzle. Holmes explores the mystery with all the skill of a detective-story writer, says Jardine.
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And Jardine has been writing as well as reading: her next book is a biography of Christopher Wren, On a Grander Scale (HarperCollins), out next month.