You quite often see the description warts and all on biographies and what is meant is that the subject turns out … on research… to be as (im)perfectly human as the rest of us! Vaughan’s great and very readable life on the greatest of all engineers is no exception, and there were certainly some warts.

It is more than the fairly usual wife neglect of the “Alpha” male that we find in many over-achievers in history, Brunel was also overly ambitious, often wrong, and usually over-spent on both estimates and budgets.

However his sheer genius shines through these wisps and fogs and the truth, in this case, fails to damage Brunel’s greatness. His works … the GWR Railroad, SS Great Britain, the Avon Gorge bridges and even his ‘domestic’ building designs … attest to a striving, driving brilliance. Adrian Vaughan actually worked on remaining segments of Brunel’s greatest monument, the GWR (see his very enjoyable autobiographical account in http://www.librarything.com/work/book/85310863 Signalman’s Morning) and describes the purity of engineering Brunel designed into such a great railway.

Eminently readable prose, a very good ‘life’ … warts and all.

Disclaimer - no relation, or none that I know of although the Author’s Photo I found for his page on LibraryThing rather belies that !