I’ve mostly spoken about medical work and neurology but two… but there were outside interests and opportunities and invitations. And in 1993 two of them came my way. One of them came from Bob Silvers, the editor of The New York Review of Books. He had sent me books over the years to review, I’d always excused myself from doing so, although, of course, one of them, When the Mind Hears, had led to a book of my own. But this book he sent me, A History of Chemistry [sic] by David Knight fascinated me very much. And in particular I was deeply fascinated by Knight’s portrait of Humphry Davy. Humphry Davy had been one of my idols in my own chemistry boyhood. It was Humphry Davy who was the first to use a battery and an electric current to isolate elements and this way he had isolated and discovered sodium, potassium, calcium, strontium, barium. He discovered more elements than... than anyone else. He… I was intrigued by his life, by his relation to Faraday who was one of his students at first. And David Knight’s book…  I don’t know that, yes, I don’t quite know whether I reviewed it, as such. I think my review of the book turned into an essay on Humphry Davy. And my favourite period in chemistry, really, a wonderful period in science and art… Richard Holmes had recently written about this, that period between about 1790 and... and 1820. It also caused me to think of some of my own boyhood in chemistry. And so this piece on Humphry Davy, which was partly a review and partly reminiscence and partly just a... a sort of, lyrical remembering of Humphry Davy, came out and Bob Silvers presented me with an early copy of it on my birthday, my 60^th birthday in... in '93.

At about the same time, I had another invitation from a magazine – I think... I think it was Discover Magazine. They said they were devoting an issue to museums and would I care to write about this? And since museums, like public libraries had been crucial for me growing up, much more so than any formal schooling, and since I had spent hundreds of hours in the South Kensington museums, in the Natural History Museum, the Science Museum and the

Geology Museum – at that time the Geology Museum was separate, it wasn’t fused with the Natural History Museum as it is now – I... I had spent so many... so many hours in museums including, on one occasion, hiding when the Natural History Museum closed at night and spending a spooky night there, where...  where dinosaur skeletons suddenly loomed up in front of me. I can’t say which of those museums was my favourite, I... or rather I should say that the Science and Geology Museums were at first my favourite because my love was in chemistry and the physical sciences and mineralogy. And then, when I was 14 plus and turned towards biology, then the Natural History Museum became my favourite. And I actually, when I was 16, got a ticket which enabled me to go into what they called the New Spirit building because, in any museum, behind what’s actually shown, there is the rest of the iceberg, the ⁶/_7, the 99% of specimens which are not on show and all the research which goes on. I still have that ticket and I was able to show it to the director of the museum when I went there with you, Kate, a couple of years ago. So, I wrote about the South Kensington museums.

So, one way and another, in these two articles in '93 I was both looking back to early adolescence and also the years just before adolescence. And what meant most to me at that time: chemistry, Humphry Davy, history of chemistry and the museums.