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EXPERIMENTAL chemist, discoverer of a gas law, England’s greatest scientific mind until it was eclipsed by Isaac Newton. Until the 1960s, this was all anyone knew of Robert Boyle, which explains why only five biographies have appeared over the course of three centuries.

We have learned a lot about Boyle in recent decades, though, not all of it flattering. In ‘s book Boyle remains a great scientist, but we also see Boyle the deranged alchemist, and Boyle the raving evangelical who would take an uncomfortably long pause whenever he uttered the Almighty’s name.

Boyle loved experimenting on his own bodily fluids, and though he remained a virgin until at least his fifties he consorted with necromancers who offered him sex with demons. There are too few records of Boyle’s everyday life for Hunter to succeed totally in writing a narrative history. Still, this is probably the fullest appreciation yet of an inimitable man.