Edward Shils’s Portraits: A Gallery of Intellectuals (University of Chicago Press, £14.25/$17.95, ISBN 0 226 75337 9) is good on personal and anecdotal detail about his subjects, all encountered in Chicago, that makes them human instead of celestials. Leo Szilard, for example, a famous nuclear research pioneer, mixed a favourite drink by ordering buttermilk, emptying the sugar bowl into it and then adding sherbet. Szilard is the only scientist in the gallery, but the others are just as interesting. Shils himself, portrayed in a long introduction, matches them.
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