A tremendous feat of scholarship but also a technical masterpiece, knitting together the four men's love lives, money troubles, ontological anxieties and the wider ferment of the Weimar republic with uncommon dexterity

Splendid, highly entertaining, attentive

Magnificent, elegantly composed and beautifully narrated

Eilenberger's survey of high thoughts and low politics among German-language philosophers of the 1920s is a salutary tale for today, not just a gripping panorama of century-old dreams and feuds

Accessible and deeply human ... He draws these four intellectual magi out of the shadows of their writings

Like any great story, Eilenberger's is not made up, but retrieved. Events have a way of narrating themselves when they encounter a gifted storyteller

A book of riches - full of stories as well as ideas, all brought together with a fine light touch

Particular brilliance ... This accessible account tells the story of the quest, and of the man who made it possible

reveals the sheer complexity, detail and dazzling precision that, for the scientist, constitutes 'beauty in nature'. Close maintains a strong narrative line - we are watching and waiting throughout for the Higgs boson to be identified.

A perfect marriage of subject and writer. With verve, insight, and rigor, Frank Close beautifully illuminates the life and times of one of physics' great, unheralded giants. Elusive is a triumph of a book, and one worthy of its subject's extraordinary contributions.

Elusive is both a deep, exciting intellectual history and an elegantly told portrait of a quiet man whose 'one great idea' changed modern physics forever. Close marries the exotic details of contemporary particle physics theory with the very human aspects of how that theory came to be. An enlightening read from one of our very best writers and practitioners of physics.

Rich, compelling, and surprising. Fundamental physics can be equal parts awe-inspiring and head-spinning, and Close masterfully captures those qualities in this deeply satisfying tale of Peter Higgs's convoluted, and very human, journey through life and science.

beautifully, engagingly written ... I was reassured by the characteristic wisdom and honesty of Close's judgement that, while the discovery of the Higgs particle completes the Standard Model of the atom, "Internal completeness is a mathematical requirement, whereas describing the world around us is the demand of natural philosophy". That sentence alone makes Elusive my book of the year.

Frank Close is probably the perfect person to tell the tale of Higgs and his boson. A serious physicist himself, he is also an exceptional author - and, unlike with most authors, his subject actually occasionally speaks to him.

the first full biography of Higgs ... focuses just as much on Higgs the particle as he does on Higgs the scientist, and the physics concepts he explores can be daunting. But this excellent book is well worth the effort.

A compelling account of the long search for the Higgs boson

Because there would be no atoms or molecules without the intervention of the Higgs field, our very existence is a consequence of its reality ... a compulsive read. Besides explaining the physics and exploring the many personalities involved, it also conveys the excitement of physics research, the missed opportunities, the happy coincidences, the false trails, the social networks, the collaborations and professional rivalries. Like an established scientific fact that will stand for all time, this book is a definitive account of an historic scientific achievement.

Not so much a history book as a book of historical significance

No other English-language biography has so successfully given us a portrait of him as man and monarch ... superb.

The best single-volume account of the reign in any language

Authoritative ... Mansel is ideally positioned to examine Louis' record ... Time and space both yield before Mansel's authorial ambition

A superb biography ... wonderfully detailed and fluent ... Mansel is alive to every nuance