ABOUT
THE BOOK

Philip Leroux, an Oxford philosophy don, has just completed a major work of scholarship – the biography of the nineteenth-century Russian emigre thinker Alexander Herzen. Almost simultaneously, Moser, his college colleague, a molecular biologist and natural philosopher is found to have died, perhaps by his own hand. In grief and bewilderment, Leroux sits down to write: about Moser and their friendship, about Moser’s struggles with scientific orthodoxy, about their love affairs with the women who became their wives, and about the place occupied by ideas of freedom and necessity in the world of creative thought. The journal grows into a meditation on biography, passion, jealousy and obsession, all informed by Herzen’s sensitive and compassionate philosophy, and the whole set in the supposedly sedate world of an Oxford college, though now seen through the eyes and pen of a man on the verge of disintegration. The Greatest Sorrow is an absorbing and exhilarating novel that links ideas of public and private history with personal worlds of passion and madness.