For Miriam Oliver in Ruth Brandon's Tickling the dragon the attraction of writing the biography of the famous scientist who was her first lover and the father of her unacknowledged child is, `In a word, power'. Having found through her researches that `his private life was a mess, his public persona was founded upon a whole series of lies', she exults, `now I've got him in my power, pinned down like a butterfly on a board. I can make him or break him'.
An unhappy mixture of fiction and serious scientific history. ( )