After a spell as a graduate student at Cambridge, he went to Germany in the 1920s when quantum theory was taking shape. He always wanted to be in the centre of things, hence the title of this book, and Monk does a superb job of explaining what exactly was happening in particle physics.

Cambridge turned out to be a not entirely happy time for Oppenheimer: once, when depressed, he left a poisoned apple for a physicist who inspired his intense jealousy. Yet this passed, and at Göttingen he worked under Max Born. On one occasion when Born went away he asked Oppenheimer to check the mathematics in a paper he had written. On his return, Oppenheimer told him it was correct and asked if he’d done it all himself. Born’s admiration knew no bounds, but he was also a little scared of the young genius. “I felt as if he were an inhabitant of Olympus who had strayed among humans and did his best to appear human.”

This Olympian, who inspired emotions from admiration to hatred, was, despite the doubts of those who promoted the security investigations, a great American patriot. But as Einstein said, “The trouble . . . is that he loves a woman who doesn’t love him—the United States Government.” As for love, he was married with two children, but never really connected with them; his daughter committed suicide after two failed marriages. Oppenheimer’s tragic flaw, brought out in the last paragraph of Monk’s great study, involves an “enigmatic elusiveness” and “inability to make ordinary close contact with the people around him”, but as Monk says, this “was what . . . enabled Oppenheimer to become the great man he showed himself to be”.