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something of far greater value. Once he had presented and defended his thesis and been awarded his doctorate they elected Joseph Needham a full-fledged fellow. He now had a boundless access to the myriad of unique marvels an ancient university can provide. He had a cozy, firelit room of his own—with a nice symmetry it was K-1, the room once occupied by Sir William Hardy, who had been such an encouragement to him—as well as a library of fine books and a handsome chapel. He could come whenever he wished to the fellows’ oak-paneled combination room to take a usually indifferent sherry or a rather better claret beneath paintings of forgotten divines of noble antiquity. He could bring guests whom he wished to impress or delight to the splendidly proportioned dining hall, where servants set down excellent food at vast tables laden with old silver and porcelain.
    His own combination of intellect and charm had been recognized very swiftly—he was still only twenty-four. People were beginning to say that he was on his way to becoming the Erasmus of the twentieth century, so sharpwas his mind, so broad his intellectual reach. But however he compared with the great scholars of the past, one thing was certain: he was now settled, and for life. Academically at least, he was made.
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    His achievements as a scientist, and as a figure with extraordinarily well-rounded interests, were now being noticed well beyond Cambridge. By 1925 he had already edited his first book, a collection of essays by some of the great scholars he had encountered while organizing lectures for the Guild of Saint Luke. All of them Joseph Needham knew personally while he was still a young man: he was a consummate networker, and his social abilities were a further key to his later success.
    Six years later he produced another book, Chemical Embryology , this time not an edited collection of other men’s works, but a history of embryology entirely written by himself. He was just thirty-one when its three volumes were published by Cambridge University Press; and though the subject was esoteric and the sales were accordingly minuscule, the sheer scale of the work—and his obvious ability to think big thoughts—hinted at what was to come in Needham’s later life.
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    Needham suffered something of a breakdown after completing the work, and for two weeks after handing in the typescript found it impossible to sleep because of hearing what he called “incessant music” in his head. Soon, though, he turned his insomnia to his advantage: Dorothy, who liked to recount stories of her husband’s formidable mental powers and his near-photographic memory, said she recalled watching him lying awake in bed, mentally visualizing the books’ page proofs, and then correcting in a notebook any errors or infelicities. Once this activity became too humdrum for him, she said, he further occupied himself by translating the selfsame pages from English into French, also in his head, and then correcting any errors that he fancied he could also see in this new translated text.
    And there was more than merely the pride of achievement. The publication of the three volumes made virtually certain the honor that would be bestowed on Needham a decade later: in 1941 he was elected a fellow ofthe Royal Society, arguably the greatest scientific distinction short of a Nobel prize. 4 His writing of a scientific classic while he was still so young a man and so untutored a researcher was something that the graybeards of the Royal Society found wholly commendable, and impossible to overlook—but that some also envied, mightily.
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    Now that Joseph and Dorothy were married and settled and had established their sexually liberal style of living, it was time for this deeply religious pair to find a church to accommodate them. That might not be easy: not only had its prelates to be supremely tolerant regarding marriage vows, but it had to be a church