Einstein: His Life and Universe
By Walter Isaacson
Simon and Schuster £25, 675 pages
FT bookshop price: £20

The popular Einstein story is impossible to resist. A young man fails his mathematics exams yet becomes the world’s greatest scientist. He works in obscurity. When he publishes his great papers, he’s ignored. Despite all this – and his autism – he triumphs. But he does so only with the help of his wife, a key source of his ideas.