John found he was blacklisted within his own country. He ended up literally at the other end of the earth, in Gisborne, the farthest corner of New Zealand, the place from which he told me his side of the story by telephone in 2012. “I was exiled,” John Marks told me. One day, the Royal Astronomical Society asked him to play Galileo at an open day. He had to playact being burned at the stake. His voice softened at the irony. But when I said to him this story made me angry, he replied, flatly: “Whatever gave [you] the idea folk in authority operate according to reason? Your trouble is you’re
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