Inside the Centre

Ray Monk has long been highly regarded as a skilled biographer. A philosopher himself, his 1991 biography of Wittgenstein won him the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize. In his latest work, however, Monk has chosen to explore the life of one of America’s most controversial scientists – Robert Oppenheimer.

While currently best remembered for his work on the Manhattan Project, he was a fascinating and complex man. At first sight, indeed, he appears to be a man of great inconsistencies. He was always academically brilliant yet, while studying at Cambridge, he become so depressed with feelings about his inadequacies that he allegedly attempted to murder PMS Blackett with a poisoned apple. In the early 1930s he was so out of touch with current affairs that he was unaware of the Wall Street Crash yet twenty years later his left wing political sympathies cost him his security clearance.

Monk, however, argues that throughout his life, Oppenheimer was deeply driven by a goal to achieve his full potential. In other words, to be the centre of everything he could.

This is a convincingly argued theory and the book shows the decade of research that Monk has devoted to it. This is a truly insightful work and is surely set to become the definitive text on Oppenheimer.