Frank Close is Professor Emeritus of Theoretical Physics at Oxford University and Fellow Emeritus in Physics at Exeter College, Oxford. He was formerly Head of the Theoretical Physics Division at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory at Harwell, vice president of the British Association for Advancement of Science and Head of Communications and Public Education at CERN. He was awarded the Kelvin Medal of the Institute of Physics in 1996, an OBE for "services to research and the public understanding of science" in 2000, and the Royal Society Michael Faraday Prize for communicating science in 2013. As a young man he worked with Rudolf Peierls, in circumstances he describes in this book.