Also known as "The Man Who Loved China" in American editions (because our versions are necessarily dumbed-down), this is the story of Joseph Needham's quest to understand an Eastern culture to which he was introduced in adulthood. A professor of chemistry and one with no official qualifications to undertake a work of rigorous history, he embarked on one of the most ambitious, lengthy, and meticulously researched pieces of scholarship in human history. At twenty-eight volumes and still in print, "Science and Civilisation in China" is (I would find out) a modern masterpiece.

Simon Winchester has a loving eye for detail, and this is what fills his books with such wonder. He also seems to be more successful when the object of his inquiry is a character rather than a place or epoch (see his brilliant "The Professor and the Madman" to American readers, vs. the less regarded "Korea"). Needham is a perfect study for Winchester's discerning talents - at once brilliant, multilingual, hypersexual, a gymnosophist - one of several new words you will learn - charming and dashing, and, again, brilliant. You will inescapably notice that Professor Needham bears no small resemblance to the author, who has a love for detail, and for whom no small morsel of knowledge is too frivolous to be examined and ingested.

Joseph Needham, a married man, was introduced to the Chinese language and culture by Lu Gwei-Djen, a 33-year old Chinese woman who was working in a Cambridge University laboratory under his supervision. This is the fulcrum on which his life would begin to turn, will the full weight of history behind it. It would be such a shame to spoil his extraordinary journey with plot-like summations. As one never to be so blessed with such tremendous mental gifts and interests, I can only understand his story like we enjoy a shooting-star, as a flash of brilliant, incomprehensible wonder, and, minding that Needham's death was at 94 years old, it is always gone too soon.