When I wrote an unadoring review of Stephen Hawking’s final book, a collection of essays published posthumously in 2018, New Scientist suppressed some of my criticisms on the grounds that it was “too early” to voice anything other than praise for the physicist who died, aged 76, that March. It was apparently still too early in 2021, when no British publisher would touch Charles Seife’s exposé of Hawking’s bullying and self-aggrandising behaviour, Hawking Hawking.

In this new biography, veteran science writer Graham Farmelo takes a different approach. It is a comprehensive and accessible portrait of a brilliant scientist and an extraordinarily determined man who also possessed deep personal flaws to which the scientific community and the public mostly turned a blind eye. The uncomfortable but unavoidable truth is that Hawking’s overweening ambition and self-promotion, his repeated failure to acknowledge the work of others, his sexism and controlling behaviour were largely ignored because of his disability. I think it is indeed going to take us years to process that.

As this book was authorised by the Hawking family, and as Farmelo (whose superb biography of Paul Dirac, The Strangest Man, won a Costa award in 2009) is a generous and kind writer, I had feared the warts would be omitted. But instead Farmelo handles them mostly by letting others’ words speak for themselves.

Which brings us to the problematic stuff. While professional colleagues mostly spoke about Hawking with reverence and affection, it is often those closest to him who speak of another side. His father, Frank, worried that the teenaged Stephen “was developing into a selfish character … like a small boy who took everything but gave little in return”. There was evidently no love lost with his sister Mary, who called him “one of the most self-centred people I’ve ever met”. At Oxford, some friends found him rather lazy and entitled, and at Cambridge “annoyingly haughty”. His youngest son recounted how his father was “hugely competitive” and never let him or his siblings win at board games.

His unsparing ridicule of his first wife Jane’s religious beliefs contributed to their marital tensions, and the sacrifices she made often went unremarked by him. The pressure of going from lover to carer would never have been easy, but Hawking’s “authoritarian” demands and indifference to Jane’s interests added to her isolation. His adoptive brother, Edward, admitted “I’ve never really felt close to Stephen … he seems very cold.” And his mother, Isobel, complained how he would ignore people when it suited him. “I suppose what in other people would just be bad manners is excusable great-mannishness in him,” she wrote bitterly in her diary.

Hawking was scandalously bad at giving due scientific credit to others, a trait evident from the outset when he failed to indicate his debt to Penrose. Worse was his treatment of physicist Jacob Bekenstein, whose idea about the connection between the area and the entropy of a black hole he mercilessly derided before discovering for himself that Bekenstein was right – and then essentially claiming the idea as his own, which Farmelo says “disappointed some of Stephen’s friends”. Hawking could clearly be a supportive and kind adviser to his own students, but when one discovered an argument for why Hawking was wrong about a conjecture concerning black holes, he tried to get him dismissed from the Cambridge PhD programme.