About the Author

James Hamilton is an art historian, biographer and curator at the University of Birmingham who has recently been elected to the Alistair Horne Fellowship at St Antony's College, Oxford, for the academic year 1998/9. He went to Manchester University in 1966 to read Mechanical Engineering but graduated with a History of Art degree. He organised and wrote the catalogue of the exhibition Turner and the Scientists at the Tate (1998), and his biography of Turner was shortlisted for the James Tait Black Memorial Award (1997).

Reviews

'Faraday could not have had a better biographer...comprehensive, lucid, unfailingly intelligent' Financial Times 'This lively new biography throws a different, highly illuminating beam on the forces that charged Faraday's imagination' Jenny Uglow, Sunday Times 'Full of rich and fascinating material Hamilton's biography humanises Faraday, and sets him convincingly in the context of Romanticism' Lisa Jardine, The Times 'This exemplary study adds new depth to our understanding of a brilliant and complex man' The Economist 'A delightful and well-illustrated account. Few historians of science write as well as Hamilton' Sunday Telegraph