I found this biography a thoroughly engaging read. Sir Alister Hardy (1896-1985) was Professor of Zoology at Oxford University from 1946 to 1961. His work in marine biology, and especially his research into plankton, led to his receiving many academic accolades and to being knighted in 1957. David Hay gives plenty of illustrations of Hardy’s strength of character (including his well-known eccentricities), and also of some of his mistakes. But what underlies this biography is what Hay says was to affect every aspect of Hardy’s career from his youth in 1914 onwards, namely his vow ‘to what I called God’ to devote his life to bringing about ‘a reconciliation between evolution theory and the spiritual awareness of man’. It would be 70 years before he felt able to admit that vow in public, though his religious commitment (as a Unitarian) was clear. In 1969 – not without difficulty – he founded the Religious Experience Research Unit, in Oxford. His successor in the post of Director in 1985, David Hay, makes a more than suitable biographer.