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“This book, like [The
Strangest Man], shows a keen sense of the human comedy. Who were these
people, and why did they behave the way they did?”
— Wall Street Journal
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“A well-written and deeply researched account of Britain’s engagement in atomic research…Farmelo’s study provides an excellent assessment of Churchill’s role in the British effort and complements Richard Rhodes’s classic The Making of the Atomic Bomb. A fine addition to the existing literature on the subject.”
— Library Journal
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“Farmelo constructs a nicely detailed and balanced record of the British ambivalence toward building an atom bomb in favor of the American effort…A tremendously useful soup-to-nuts study of how Britain and the US embraced a frightening atomic age.”
— Kirkus Reviews
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“Graham Farmelo offers a fresh and thoroughly
researched history of the development of atomic weapons in his
insightful and engaging account of Winston Churchill’s failure to forge a
partnership of equal exchange between Great Britain and the United
States in the development of the bomb.”
— Mary Jo Nye, professor of history emerita, Oregon State University
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“An excellent book. Graham Farmelo draws on many sources to show how
Churchill, his scientific adviser Frederick Lindemann, and a host of
other scientists and politicians developed the atomic bomb…But Farmelo’s book does more than unfold the hopes,
doubts, and fears engendered by the bomb: it illuminates the
relationship between big science and modern democracy.”
— James W. Muller, professor of political science, University of Alaska, Anchorage
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“A riveting,
powerful, and timely reminder that high politics is anything but rational.
Graham Farmelo vividly reveals how Winston Churchill learned about atomic
physics in the 1920s, warned about the imminence of nuclear weapons in the 30s,
and yet, paradoxically, squandered Britain’s lead in the field during the
Second World War.”
— Roger Highfield, Science Museum executive and Daily Telegraph columnist
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“[A] dazzling book…Farmelo,
prize-winning biographer of the physicist Paul Dirac, recounts this important
story with skill and erudition…It’s the paradoxes and the nuances that make
this episode in history, now illuminated as never before, so compelling.”
— Guardian (London)
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“Compelling…The value
of Farmelo’s book is in its meticulous attention to the contingencies, accidents,
uncertainties, inconsistencies, and idiosyncratic personalities in the story of
how Britain didn’t get the Bomb during the war and how it did get it
afterwards. It could all have turned out differently—but it didn’t.”
— London Review of Books
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“The author, a
physicist, ranges across Winston Churchill’s long career…Farmelo is especially
good on the Second World War years, revealing much about the Anglo-American
relationship that has been guarded or unclear…Colorful.”
— Nature
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“A story as gripping
as it is elegantly argued and precise.”
— Financial Times
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“[Churchill’s Bomb]
scores some powerful points…The book describes a confounding sort of country: a
small island capable of beating the world, steeped in self-defeating snobbery
and parochialism.”
— Economist