Unit 4, Part 1

His face is on tea towels and mugs and posters and T-shirts; an image fixed in the brain.

An old man, with clouds of white hair and dark, expressive eyes that had seen the mysteries of the universe, shrewd and innocent and beyond us.

Albert Einstein invented relativity, with its elastic view of time and space. With pure thought, he changed our perception of reality.

Marilyn Monroe called him the sexiest man on earth - and, like Marilyn Monroe, Hitler perhaps, he is one of the icons of the twentieth century. Less well-known, in spite of the numerous biographies of him, is the younger Albert Einstein. The face stares from the cover of Dennis Overbye's biography: dark-haired and neat and conventionally posed beside the intense, dark-haired woman who was for many years his melancholy wife: Mileva Maric.

The author has set out to write about the man behind the image, and so give him back his humanity: the restless son of a conventional family, the 'young brawler, the flirt, the violinist, the dreamer, the man in love, the man in flight from love's demands. His book proceeds like leapfrog: a chapter or so on physics; a chapter or so on Einstein's love adventures, his passionate relationship with his mother, his marriage that started so ardently but eventually collapsed in bitterness and grief.

Einstein was born at the end of the 1880s. He discovered relativity and quantum physics before he was 40. He was awarded the 1921 Nobel Prize for Physics, though the vast implications of his discovery unfolded gradually thereafter.

The personal life is not simple at all; no harmony there. The book almost starts off as a dual biography, of Einstein and Maric, whom he met when they were students. She was also a physicist, one of the rare female students to study pure science. And clearly one of the things that drew Einstein to her was her difference. He was outgoing and charming; she was solitary, intense, silent and insecure.

He adored her for a bit, wooed her passionately, loved her more passionately when they were separated, and, it seems, married her at last out of duty, when the love was already fading.

He passed his exams with flying colours. She failed hers, partly because she was already pregnant with their first child.

They married at last, to the horror of both families, and she had two more children, sons whom Einstein loved and neglected. He had affairs, she had illnesses. He had triumphs, intellectual excitements, praise. She became less important; sat at home while he roamed Europe and fell in love with another woman.

Eventually Mileva and Einstein are divorced, bitterly, in a dispute that lasts about the same amount of time as the First World War. Her identity was scarcely known during his famous later life, because he never talked about her and she remained, as always, silent. Mileva never comes to life: she is too much of a cliché of the pensive and melancholy Serb. Mileva's story is the familiar, depressing one of a woman adored when young and pretty and strange, who gives up her work and her country for the man she loves, but is left behind. She is an emblematic betrayed wife.

Einstein's story has a heroic continuation beyond the marriage; Mileva's story comes to a dreary end. The author strains too much for effect. He wants to restore Einstein to his humanity - to make him credible and explicable; the young scuffler abroad. But what Einstein did in his life remains hardly credible, always inexplicable, deeply mysterious - an icon forever.