The New Elizabethans: Sixty Portraits of our Age. James Naughtie

for his secretary for use as a reply to enquirers. It was headed ‘Dr F.H.C. Crick thanks you for your letter but regrets that he is unable to accept your kind invitation to: …’ There followed a list of requests of the kind he was used to receiving: send an autograph, be interviewed, speak after dinner, deliver a lecture, read a manuscript, even ‘cure your disease’. His secretary had instructions to tick the appropriate category and send the postcard. It repelled all boarders.

      So Crick was a character, irascible on subjects like religion, which, like most philosophy, he abhorred. (He resigned from Churchill, a new Cambridge college, when he discovered they were building a chapel.) And those close to Rosalind Franklin, particularly, long held a grudge at what they believed was a betrayal of her originality and the contribution she’d made to genetic research.

      But it would be quite wrong to picture Crick as a scientist who happened to break the mould very early – he was 36 when the double helix paper was published – and spent the rest of his life being famous for it. The truth is that much of his pioneering work was done after that first discovery. He never left the territory he had staked out, and long after he was one of the three men who got the Nobel Prize in 1962 he was breaking new ground.

      The initial proposition had been that there was some kind of linear genetic message that could be passed on. They had discovered how genes could copy themselves and human life could replicate. We had a glimpse of how the essentials of human life were managed. But then what? It was a beginning, not an end. Crick set about working on the question of how genes coped with the instructions they’d been sent, and it was thirteen years after the first Nature paper before he felt able to declare that he might have an answer.

      The occasion was the annual meeting of molecular biologists at Cold Spring Harbor in the United States, where he was now working. They were scientists whose field of study had more or less been created by Crick and Watson and whose successors, a generation later, would find themselves in maybe the most exciting, ever-changing field of science, mapping the genome, inspiring medical research with possibilities, opening up territory for doctors as well as scientists that not long ago had been an impenetrable misty landscape with no signposts.

      Crick began that 1966 speech with the words: ‘This is an historic occasion. There have been many meetings about the genetic code during the past ten or twelve years but this is the first important one to be held since the code became known.’ A typically emphatic description. He went on to announce that he could now present to the world the genetic code in its entirety. It was this map that would become a guide for everyone working in molecular biology, and in medical laboratories everywhere the step-by-step unravelling of the genetic puzzle changed everything. Crick himself led the way, and it will be his name that is attached to the institute that will open in 2015 in London to bring together some of the world’s finest minds in biomedicine.

      It is worth remembering Watson’s reminder to Crick about data complicating life: go for the big idea. When they marched into the Eagle in Cambridge in 1953 convinced they had ‘got it’ they weren’t talking about a vast tome that they’d been writing in secret. Their article in Nature was only fourteen paragraphs long, and attached to it was a single diagram: the skeletal and beautiful picture of the double helix itself; the strange, sparse outline of the most intimate thing in the world.

Doris Lessing

      Some novelists take years to get into their stride, but it is true of Doris Lessing that if you want to understand her, and feel the full power of her imagination, you have to read her first book, which was published in 1950. The Grass is Singing is a story set in Africa, where she grew up, where she experienced unhappiness and political radicalization, and where she decided to be writer. More than half a century later Lessing had become a Nobel Laureate with dozens of books behind her, even an opera with Philip Glass.

      The Grass is Singing takes you to the kind of rolling landscape and bush where her father farmed in Southern Rhodesia, a generation before it became Zimbabwe, and where she developed a passionate desire to see an end to colonialism. The novel is an uncompromising journey into a world of fear and racial segregation where violence is as familiar as the wind that makes the grass sing. It’s a story of murder – committed by a black houseboy on the white woman to whom he is in effect a slave, but who is so fascinated and drawn to him that it nearly becomes an obsession – and a sharp-edged picture of the world, which she knew, that made the tragedy almost inevitable. Moses, the murderer, and Mary Turner, his victim, are both destroyed by the way in which they have to live. The book trembles with passion, like this: ‘When a white man in Africa by accident looks into the eyes of a native and sees the human being (which it is his chief preoccupation to avoid), his sense of guilt, which he denies, fumes up in resentment, and he brings down the whip.’

      Lessing had lived in Africa from 1925, when her father bought 1,000 acres in the bush and took his family from Persia, now Iran, where Doris had been born six years earlier. She experienced a childhood which she has often described as unhappy, and one of its main components was solitude. From an early age her life involved rejection, first of a community in which she watched people being demeaned and then of the Marxist solution which she thought, for a while, might be the answer. ‘What fools we were!’ she said long afterwards about her ten years or so in the Communist Party.

      Her first marriage ended and she left her husband and two children for Gottfried Lessing, whom she’d met at a Communist book club. They had a son together but were divorced in 1949 when she decided to move to London to pursue her writing career, taking her son with her. The government of Southern Rhodesia would later accuse her of ‘subversive activities’ for arguing that the black population was being exploited, and she was labelled a prohibited immigrant. A phase of her life was over. It had begun in the shadow of the First World War, in which her father lost a leg: she saw him as representative of a whole generation who had been ruined by war. Africa also saddened her and made her angry. London was to be a new start.

      As a writer, however, she continued to refuse to be confined, and that has been her spirit from the beginning. In The Golden Notebook, published in 1962, she wrote about a woman undergoing a breakdown – in a world that seems to be breaking from its moorings – and presented an unforgettable picture of her efforts to compartmentalize her life to deal with its disintegration. The novelist Margaret Drabble, one of the British writers from the sixties influenced strongly by feminist ideas, has said of the book: ‘Here was a writer who said the unsayable, thought the unthinkable, and fearlessly put it down there, in all its raw emotional and intellectual chaos. She managed to make sense of her material, but at enormous risk.’ The unsayable, among other things, was to talk about menstruation in the way that James Joyce had talked of masturbation and shaken Ireland, and also to subject to meticulous scrutiny the pressures and desires, and the trade-offs they demanded, experienced by women of the early sixties. All that, and around them a world in which leftist progressives were having to cope with the Russians’ own revelations and denunciation of Stalinist terror. Bleakness unconfined.

      Drabble pointed out that in The Golden Notebook Lessing was simultaneously progressive and conservative. When Anna, the main character, who is a writer, is discussing orgasm and the rights and wrongs of sex with a man whom she doesn’t love, her Jungian analyst promotes a view that is traditionalist about sexual loyalty rather than radically modern and free-thinking. The book’s power lies in its relentless, page-by-page denunciation of simplistic thinking. No doubt that is why it unsettled so many people who recognized it for the radical text that it was and then found it unexpectedly disturbing.

      When Lessing wrote The Golden Notebook this novel was controversial, not least among women critics, for some of whom, in the course of a few years, it would become something of an inspiration and almost a fictional textbook for feminism. Just as she had refused to be confined by the effective apartheid of her upbringing, and then by too rigid a political reaction to it, she was not going to be turned into an icon, or even a heroine, by anyone.

      Much later, in the nineties, she spoke in an interview about her regular arguments with feminists for whom she was an inspiration on the page but an irritation in the flesh.