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

home, her alarm about nuclear weapons led her to become one of the most influential scientists attached to the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. CND came about as a consequence of an article in the New Statesman in 1957 by the writer J.B. Priestley, and by the following Easter it had enough support to organize a four-day march to the nuclear research establishment at Aldermaston. The protest was led by a colourful assortment of public figures, among them the philosopher Bertrand Russell, Canon John Collins of St Paul’s Cathedral, the writer and Labour figure Michael Foot and the historian A.J.P. Taylor. Hodgkin was one of CND’s first supporters and one of those who, because of her scientific credentials, lent the movement a weight that it would not otherwise have had.

      Into the early sixties, the Aldermaston marches at Easter were public events of considerable significance and captured a great deal of attention – although CND had undergone internal splits and Canon Collins resigned the chairmanship – and even after its influence waned quite fast Hodgkin continued throughout that decade to support political campaigns – for example, against American military involvement in Vietnam. She also went on visiting the Soviet Union and China, at a time when contacts were much more difficult than scientists of a later generation could imagine. The fact that one of the reasons she was welcomed so warmly was because of her criticism of the West didn’t bother her at all: she wanted to talk to fellow chemists. Until the darkness of Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution descended and China was cut off from the outside world for years, she was one of the scientists who travelled there regularly from the West, and she was able to report on the progress made by Chinese researchers into insulin, in parallel with her own research. In the last year of her life, 1993, although frail she defied her doctors to attend one last conference in Beijing.

      She was criticized for allowing her convictions about scientific cooperation to cause her to ignore the suppression of individual freedom – in the Soviet Union, for example – but she remained determined to pursue her contacts however often she might be accused of being politically naïve. In 1987, in old age, she was awarded the Lenin Peace Prize, in the last days of the Soviet Union – and regretted none of her political activity.

      All through the sixties she had pushed back the barriers in her chosen field of research. Work in Cambridge demonstrated that protein molecules could indeed be subject to X-ray crystallography and she and her group continued to work on insulin, the subject of her first investigations in the thirties. By 1969 she was able to bring that work to a triumphant conclusion and reveal insulin’s whole molecular structure.

      The accounts of the climax of that research catch something of the excitement that seemed to well up in every lab where Hodgkin worked. She and her colleagues spent a weekend building a model of the molecule. Suffering from severe rheumatoid arthritis, she was wearing slippers because of her swollen ankles, but like the rest she laboured through the night to complete the model. When it was unveiled a few weeks later it was the product of half a lifetime’s work. She put it like this: ‘I used to say that the evening I developed the first X-ray photograph I took of insulin in 1935 was the most exciting moment of my life. But the Saturday afternoon in late July 1969, when we realized that the insulin electron density map was interpretable, runs that moment very close.’

      From accounts by her colleagues a picture emerges of a passionate and warm woman – her students knew her as ‘Dorothy’ and nothing else – who was able to inspire them with the excitements of science. Despite the pain she often suffered she had great dexterity in the lab and she loved the practical business of devising experiments and seeing them through, each one a journey of discovery. Her work on vitamin B12 brought her the Nobel Prize for chemistry in 1964 – she was the first woman scientist to have won it since Marie Curie in 1911 – and in the seventies the Royal Society honoured her with its most important award, the Copley Medal. Although she told friends that honours didn’t interest her she did accept membership of the Order of Merit in 1965 (on the same day as Benjamin Britten), the first woman to be celebrated in this way since Florence Nightingale.

      In her later years Hodgkin had the satisfaction of watching rapid medical advances that owed a great deal to her work in unlocking the structure of molecules, giving biologists the information they needed to understand much that had been impenetrable. And she never lost her appetite for discovery. She once said that ‘there are two moments that are important. There’s the moment when you know that you can find out the answer and that’s the period you are sleepless before you know what it is. When you’ve got it and know what it is, then you can rest easy.’

      She had an intriguing hobby. She was born in Cairo (in 1910) and her parents later moved to Sudan. So it was maybe not surprising that she developed an early interest in ancient artefacts and archaeology – as a student she combined archaeology and chemistry until she decided to specialize. And all her life she retained and interest in ancient mosaics in particular – as if they were human creations that matched in their beauty some of the miracles of nature that fascinated her all her days.

Harold Pinter

      Harold Pinter’s literary career might have finished before it had begun. It was saved by one review of a play which didn’t appear until after the play had closed because everyone else thought it was so bad. He kept framed on his wall at home a record of the box-office takings at the Lyric Theatre, Hammersmith, which started at £140 on Monday – the first night of The Birthday Party in 1958 – and had dropped to £2 9/- by the Thursday matinée, when only six people came. The reviews suggested that they were brave souls.

      Fortunately for Pinter, Harold Hobson of the Sunday Times had joined the tiny audience on the Wednesday, and although his notice appeared after the management had decided to cut their losses and close the doors as soon as they could, it did say that he had experienced the most original, arresting and disturbing talent in theatrical London. Pinter had a lifeline, and clung to it. From deep discouragement, he crawled back, kept at it, and within a couple of years that ‘arresting’ talent was the talk of the town. Later he would not only see that play become one everyone wished they had been at, but also have the mixed pleasure of receiving the Nobel Prize for Literature and having his name pass into the language. For ‘Pinteresque’ became the label for any silence on the stage that seemed, mysteriously, to be more important than the words that surrounded it.

      His understandable despair at that caricature was only one of a host of irritations that risked turning him into a public misanthrope. But that was misleading. If he was on a protest march – especially against some new twist in American foreign policy which he thought devilish – he would appear unbendingly sour and strident, but if he was at Lord’s watching a test match he would be a picture of gentleness, soothed by warm beer and conversation about some century of yesteryear or the art of leg spin. His passions were entwined, and not at all simple. Simplicity was something he seemed not to believe in; and his best characters all feared it. They knew that too much clarity in life was dangerous.

      He was once asked why he thought so many of his audiences were drawn to the conversations in his plays: why were they so effective? He said: ‘I think it’s possibly because people fall back on anything they can lay their hands on, verbally, to keep away from the danger of knowing, and of being known.’ That struggle to survive by spinning a yarn, or going on the attack, or playing games is one that fascinated him and gave most of his plays their energy. In No Man’s Land, which is where the two principal characters find themselves, they never explain what they have escaped from or precisely what they fear – except that in circling each other, hinting at darkness, then telling a joke, probing a little, then closing up, they paint for an audience a perfectly comprehensible account of what no man’s land is, though you can’t be sure of how they got there, how much they want to get out of it, and what their chances are. Worlds of the here and now and of the imagination collide, and we’re never sure what the end result will be.

      His experience with The Birthday Party, which nearly put him off playwriting, occurred when he was in his late twenties. In the following decade he wrote radio plays and revues, film scripts, and two plays in particular that filled West End theatres: The Caretaker and The Homecoming. He was also directing