The place was the University of Cambridge, a campus awash with the world’s greatest mathematicians, astronomers and physicists. The time was just after the second world war. Astronomy was at a stage where, if you were good at physics and mathematics, there were hundreds of problems you could tackle. Hoyle tried them all, and succeeded in many.

What is endearing about Hoyle are the contrasts. There was the no-nonsense, plain-speaking Yorkshireman, combative, careful with money, self-reliant, self-made and engagingly witty battling with the Cambridge system. Consider the amazing advances Hoyle made in the fields of stellar evolution and the thermonuclear synthesis of elements, against his stubborn allegiance to the hypothesis of continuous cosmological creation when it was well past its sell-by date. Then his hit-and-run interests in fringe topics: dead birds (archaeopteryx); stone circles (Stonehenge); and life being seeded from elsewhere (panspermia).

Marvel at the maverick doing superb establishment jobs like organising the building of the Anglo Australian Telescope and becoming president of the Royal Astronomical Society. And he was a consummate astronomical populariser, broadcaster and science-fiction novelist. He was a loner who loved the company of other researchers. He was a great friend but could be consumed with a corrosive paranoia.

Simon Mitton was a research fellow under Hoyle and knew him for nearly 30 years. I eagerly turned the pages and finished this immensely enjoyable biography wishing it were twice as long.

Another well-researched and thoroughly referenced biography, Jane Gregory’s Fred Hoyle’s Universe, will be published on 26 May. Again we are entertained by a succession of enlightening episodes in a dramatic life. Again we marvel at the hosts of people interviewed and the multitude of reviews and manuscripts consulted. The huge respect and admiration that both Mitton and Gregory have for their subject is palpable. But both books leave you with a feeling that someone somewhere might soon be laying to one side some slightly rose-tinted spectacles and preparing to tell another story.