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

the Russian cello master who had been given ‘disapproved’ status by the Soviet authorities and, finally, had to leave his homeland, penniless and emotionally broken. Britten welcomed and championed him, and his musical relationship with Rostropovich was one of the most satisfying for him.

      The vigour in that musical relationship reveals Britten’s zest for life. He was a ragbag of nerves before any performance, and capable of reticence that tipped easily into rudeness and even cruelty to friends. The stories of people finding themselves excluded from the inner circle, cherished then dropped like a stone, are still the folk tales of Aldeburgh. But he also liked fast cars and fun, would start the day with a cold bath to jerk himself into action, and could relax with a party-goer’s enthusiasm.

      That energy produced his work for children, which is one of his legacies. He particularly loved the sound of boys’ unbroken voices – his devotion to the Church of England’s choral tradition was a pillar of his life – and in songs, orchestral arrangements and pieces for voice and orchestra like Noye’s Fludde he was able to do something that few composers of his weight could manage: produce music of great power in a style that meant it could be played or sung by young musicians. Such pieces were introductions to the language of music and its subterranean excitements.

      In Noye’s Fludde he produced an orchestral sound that involves everybody, with some parts written in perfect simplicity, to be played on open strings, for example. It is a masterpiece of construction. Because of Britten’s sexuality, which he never tried to conceal despite the social (not to say legal) pressures to do so, there was from time to time prurient speculation about his interest in children. No one has ever been able to contradict what seems the truth: that he was energized innocently by them because inside he felt that he had never really grown up. And, like all his commitments, it never wavered.

      He could seem a forbidding figure from outside – a deeply furrowed brow and anxious eyes – but for those who knew him and watched him perform he was a benign magician. Pears said: ‘You could watch Ben holding his hands over the piano preparatory to playing a slow movement, a soft, soft chord – and you could see his fingers alert, alive, really sometimes even quivering with intensity. It was amazing what colours he could get: he thought a colour and he could do it.’

      As a composer he had no doubt where he stood. He was as English as Elgar, his harmonies evoking a sighing reed bed on his native coast or a stormy sea that springs to life from the page, and a composer who rose above narrow classification. Original, brave, stubborn, with an imagination of genius, he towered above his contemporaries. And from start to finish he lived his life without compromise in exactly the way he wanted, carving a place for himself that would always be his alone.

      He refused a knighthood but was a member of the Order of Merit and accepted a life peerage in the year he died. His death was the lead item on the BBC News and his obituaries celebrated a life that had been gilded and, above all, different. That quality was marked in the letter of condolence delivered to Aldeburgh from Buckingham Palace, in a fashion that would have been unthinkable a few years before. The Queen expressed her sadness directly to his lover, Peter Pears. Outsiders no more.

Dorothy Hodgkin

      When Dorothy Hodgkin went up to Oxford University to read chemistry in 1928 she was in a band of pioneers. Not until 1920 had women been admitted as students with the same status as men, and she was one of the early trailblazers. That liberation produced a career in science that took her to the top: to the Royal Society’s most celebrated award, to a Nobel Prize, and allowed her to make discoveries that shaped our time.

      She cracked the secrets of insulin, penicillin and many proteins in a way that allowed scientists to leap forward. It produced medical advance, research in hitherto closed areas of chemistry, and consequently established whole new areas of study in biology. It was she who showed that understanding how molecules were built could unlock the mysteries of their biological functions. In deciphering the structure of molecules she drew a map: for many scientists it was possible for the first time to see where they were going. One of her admiring colleagues who watched her work over many decades said: ‘She was one of these masters whose method of work is as exciting and beautiful to follow as the results that flow from it.’ Hodgkin herself summed it up like this: ‘I was captured for life by chemistry and by crystals.’

      She was also the tutor who introduced the student Margaret Roberts to the chemistry lab and who, forty years on, would argue with that former student, now Margaret Thatcher – politely but resolutely – about her view of the world. With her privileged access to the only British Prime Minister to have a science degree, Hodgkin thought that she could make a rational case for better relations across the Iron Curtain, which was always one of her fervent hopes. She believed that Western scientists should help their Russian and Chinese counterparts, cut off from so much for so long, and never regretted that in the tumult of the sixties she had chosen, as a scientist, to campaign for nuclear disarmament.

      Mrs Thatcher told her how much she valued her advice – though politically they were of vividly different political stripes – and she hung a portrait of Hodgkin in her study at Number 10, a striking acknowledgement of her encounter with a formidable intellect. Some in Oxford noticed that on her groundbreaking visit to see Mikhail Gorbachev in Moscow in 1987 the Prime Minister included in her itinerary the Institute of Crystallography, where Hodgkin was a valued friend.

      Hodgkin’s impact on science can be traced back to the work she started in a small basement room in the corner of the university library in Oxford in the mid-thirties. After graduation as Dorothy Crowfoot – men outnumbered women students in the faculty by twelve to one – she’d gone to Cambridge for her doctorate and returned to a fellowship at Somerville College, with which she would be associated for the rest of her life. She set up X-ray equipment in that small shared laboratory, and published her first serious paper, under her name alone, in 1935. It had the simple and startling title ‘X-ray single photographs of insulin’: a lifetime of discovery in crystallography had begun. In the next decade her work on the structure of penicillin was published under her married name. She had met her husband, Thomas, in the thirties and – a little reluctantly, it seems – accepted the social convention that from then on she’d be the chemist Hodgkin.

      Her method was X-ray crystallography, which allowed you to take a picture of how the atoms fitted together in the molecule. Her work on penicillin was a revelation because it had proved impervious to that kind of examination in the past: to put it simply, no one knew exactly how penicillin worked. Once you had a picture of it, you knew. The most important discoveries were made during the war and kept secret. Afterwards manufacturers had an interest in maintaining that secrecy for commercial advantage, so it was only in 1949 that, with others, Hodgkin could finally publish her research. It was a time of great excitement because the potential power of the computer was beginning to be understood, and the possibilities of her work were being transformed. By the mid-fifties she had unravelled the complexities of a molecule of vitamin B12, which had long baffled her peers. For a chemist, one of her admiring colleagues said, it was like breaking the sound barrier.

      Hodgkin was a woman of striking appearance. She had fair hair and blue eyes and was fond of wearing handmade clothes, in defiance of any fashion that might be around, cutting a notable figure in Oxford. And politically she was fiery. Early on in the thirties, encouraged by her mother to lean to the left, she developed political commitments that she never abandoned. When she was reaching the most productive phase of her life as a chemist, during the fifties, this caused her considerable difficulty. She was a socialist; her husband Thomas was closely associated with the Communist Party and in those days that was a taint that was hard to erase. The State Department in Washington declared her ‘statutorily inadmissible’ to the United States in 1953, citing her membership of Science for Peace, a body it regarded as little more than a Communist front. At that time, with Senator Joseph McCarthy whipping up alarm about the influence of Communists in American institutions of all kinds, it was very hard for her to overcome the obstacle: academic distinction was not enough. It took her four years – and McCarthy’s disgrace and fall from influence – to have that ban waived, but throughout her life she still had to