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The Genius Myth - Signed First Edition
The Genius Myth - Signed First Edition
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by Lewis, Helen | History
Published 19/06/2025 by Vintage Publishing (Jonathan Cape Ltd) in the United Kingdom
Hardback | 320 pages
240 x 156mm | 500g
Signed First Edition - Hardback - Publishes June 19th
A Guardian, Financial Times, New Statesman and GQ Book for 2025
'Brilliant, timely and compulsively readable' Oliver Burkeman
The tortured poet. The rebellious scientist. The monstrous artist. The tech disruptor.
You can tell what a society values by who it labels as a genius. You can also tell who it excludes, who it enables, and what it is prepared to tolerate.
Taking us from the Renaissance Florence of Leonardo da Vinci to the Floridian rocket launches of Elon Musk’s SpaceX, Helen Lewis unravels a word that we all use — without really questioning what it means.
Along the way, she uncovers the secret of the Beatles’ success, asks how biographers should solve the Austen Problem, and reveals why Stephen Hawking thought IQ tests were for losers (before taking one herself). And she asks if the modern idea of genius — a class of special people — is distorting our view of the world.
