Like many readers of this chapter my early encounters with science were not only through the school laboratory and classroom but also through reading biographies of scientists. Excepting the adventures of Biggies and Gimlet, my serious reading as a child was largely confined to biographies of Newton, Davy, Pasteur and many others, often in the form of collected biographies, such as Egon Larsen's Men who Changed the World (1954) and J.G. Crowther's Six Great Scientists (1955). Such works kindled my interest in science and played some role (which I leave to my future biographers to specify) in my choice of career, first as a physicist and subsequently as an historian of science. Yet as a young consumer of biographies I would have had no appreciation of the complexities of biographical narratives or of their cultural, educational and ideological functions. I simply lapped them up and contented myself by reading about the Great and the Good and how they contributed to science.

More recently I have re-engaged the subject of scientific biography not only as a consumer but also as a producer, in writing a biographical study of Michael Faraday, in which I paid particular attention to the interrelation between his science and his religion.