Hawking Graham Farmelo (UK: John Murray, out 24 September; US: Bantam, out 24 November) Is there anything new left to say about Stephen Hawking? The world-famous physicist, who died in 2018, has been the subject of multiple books, documentaries and films, as well as penning dozens of his own tomes. In Hawking by Graham Farmelo, we now have the first authorised biography, and with it access to previously unpublished material from the Hawking family and others.
Despite this, his family life is probably the least interesting part of the book – the really compelling stuff is in reassessing his later life. Part of this is down to a problem common to almost all biographies: people and their families don’t tend to do anything interesting before they become famous for the thing you actually want to read about. The first five of 17 chapters cover Hawking’s life in extensive detail, thanks to detailed documents written by his parents Frank and Isabel, including an unpublished autobiography by the former.
But what do we actually learn? The best new popular science books of September 2026 Unsurprisingly for someone born in 1942, Hawking had a fairly typical middle-class post-war childhood. His father enjoyed DIY and sharing a telescope with Hawking, while his mother was in charge of the bulk of the childcare.
The family had a near-miss with a Nazi V1 rocket. They grew their own vegetables to supplement meagre rations. All of this is documented and footnoted by Farmelo’s impressive scholarship, and a figure like Hawking is certainly worth of such historical investigation, but a thrilling read it is not.
Material on Hawking’s diagnosis with motor neuron disease and his family’s reaction to the news that he would likely be dead within in a decade unsurprisingly pulls much harder on the heartstrings, as does his growing romance and eventual marriage to his first wife Jane. But yet again, I couldn’t help feel that all of this is well-trodden ground, particularly from Jane’s autobiography and the film it spawned, The Theory of Everything, in which Hawking is played by Eddie Redmayne. It is only around a quarter of the way into the book, when Hawking becomes a jobbing scientist, that my interest began to pick up.
The physics landscape of the late 1960s and early 70s was very different to what it is today, and Farmelo does a fantastic job of immersing you in this world. Black holes, which while still puzzling to us today are mostly uncontroversial, were thought of by many as “the cosmic counterpart of the Loch Ness Monster”, Farmelo writes – meaning Hawking was really sticking his neck out in working on them. It is here that a distasteful recurring thread first emerges – Hawking’s frequent oversight in acknowledging collaborators.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
