Faust in Copenhagen: The Struggle for the Soul of Physics and the Birth of the Nuclear Age By Gino Segre Jonathan Cape ₤20, 310 pages FT bookshop price: ₤16

Physics was in ferment during the early years of the 20th century. Galvanised by Einstein’s reworking of our comprehension of time and space and Rutherford’s discovery of the atomic nucleus, a group of Europe’s finest scientific minds was engaged in a struggle to understand the nature of matter.