However, it was revolutionary stuff, and in 1919 there was further excitement when a solar eclipse confirmed his theories about light rays being deflected by the sun’s magnetic field. In 1921 he won the Nobel prize.Fortuitously, Einstein was away from Berlin lecturing at the California Institute of Technology when the Nazis came to power in 1933. He remained in the US, became a professor at Princeton and took American citizenship, and by the Forties his name was synonymous with brainpower. Indeed, my mother recalls referring to a particularly swotty classmate as “an Einstein” – which is rather humbling because, by the time I was at school, a brainy person was merely “a bit of a Bamber Gascoigne” Now, they are “a right old Carol Vorderman”. How standards slip.Just before the Second World War, American scientists learnt that their counterparts in Germany were close to developing an atomic bomb.

Alarmed, Einstein wrote his historic letter to President Roosevelt, insisting that America should push ahead with its own nuclear research Roosevelt took heed. However, when this research led to the devastation at Hiroshima and Nagasaki Einstein was horrified, and deeply troubled by his own role in the affair. He duly became chairman of a committee of nuclear scientists that campaigned for a ban on nuclear weapons. Giving the atomic bomb to politicians and soldiers, he said, was like handing a razor to a three- year-old child.In 1952, Einstein, not an observant Jew but a keen Zionist, was invited by the Israeli prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, to become president of the infant state of Israel. He was extremely flattered but said that he did not consider himself worthy of such a position It is hard to imagine anyone worthier.. East of the Mountains

by David Guterson
Bloomsbury, pounds 16.99, 279ppDO YOU know what a ring-angle piton is, or a carabiner, or a chukar? When it comes to apples, can you tell a Stayman Winesap from a Rome Beauty? Perhaps you can, in which case the details that threaten to suffocate David Guterson’s second novel might seem welcoming.

It’s true that, if the novelist can be said to have any “duties”, one of them must be to show us things we do not know. That is why Guterson’s debut, Snow Falling on Cedars, worked so well despite operating in that most superannuated of genres: the courtroom drama.Here, though, I can’t help feeling that Guterson succumbs to the fallacy that if you fill in enough details, provide enough names (apples, birds, plants), it will add up to the World. He gives a page of Acknowledgements to people and books who provided him with information (including the no doubt treasurable Apples Galore by one Al C Bright). Fiction and research are not incompatible, but too often he seems to want to fashion heartfelt from secondhand knowledge.This is a shame, because his story needs neither documentary authentication nor the lumbering, quasi-archaic cadences to which Guterson habitually resorts. A 73-year-old doctor, Ben Givens, dying of cancer and unwilling to subject himself and his family to a slow, painful death, decides to kill himself. Aware that his suicide will cause anguish, he plans to disguise it as an accident while hunting chukar (a kind of partridge, apparently) in the countryside east of the mountains outside Seattle.Needless to say, his plans go wrong; otherwise, this novel would be a short story. Although Guterson tells us very early that Givens “felt no longer part of the world.

Everything reeked of the grave”, memories swirl around him: of his wife who died two years earlier; of his time as a soldier in the Second World War, first in the icy hell of the Colorado mountains, then in Italy (half-a-dozen books about the war get mentioned in the Acknowledgements). While the past crowds in, the present too, demands attention and a series of mundane yet pregnant encounters serves to make the doctor more aware of his pain, more “part of the world”.If this makes it sound like something of an odyssey towards spiritual fulfillment, that may be part of Guterson’s intention There are moments when the portentousness is oppressive. Still, he writes from an abundant love of the physical world, of the landscape, above all of the people who give it meaning.They matter more than ring-angle pitons, more even than Stayman Winesaps – which if they’re anything like the American apples we get over here, probably don’t taste of anything much at all Despite its problems, is a great deal better than that The truth is not always in the details.. The Case of

Stephen Lawrence
by Brian CathcartViking, pounds 16.99, 434ppThis book is a triumph of skilled reportage. Brian Cathcart is an experienced journalist with a number of books behind him. When the Lawrence tragedy first began to unfold in public, he threw himself into the case, poring over thousands of documents, interviewing scores of participants and then assiduously attending throughout the Macpherson inquiry, bearing first-hand witness as the truth about the role of the Metropolitan Police gradually emerged to an incredulous public.

His writings on the subject are already familiar, from newspapers, magazines and literary periodicals. He has been our principal interpreter of the case of Stephen Lawrence, and now he has capped his achievements with this definitive account of the whole affair, from the actual murders to the public response to the Macpherson recommendations earlier this year.The book is long and it has been published very fast. But it is in no way a cut-and-paste collation of earlier, instant work. It has its own coherent structure and a narrative form that is never repetitive or long- winded. Complex events and various twists and turns in the case are always explained with exactly the right degree of emphasis, the author deciding covertly on our behalf how much attention we should pay to them.