If you're writing about one real person in history, you can soak up that person as a human, collect all the things you can gloss over in a documentary. But to balance five or six of them, there isn't time to do justice to each character. And if you get too heavy on the science, you'll lose the audience.

I cheated slightly, ... I wrote what I wanted them to say and then basically browbeat them into saying it.

I would have thought they would have better things to do like saving real animals from cruelty, ... This is a toy that is used to relieve stress, it's meant to be a bit of a giggle.

Einstein was a really interesting guy. He wasn't some dutiful little chap who went through the academic system and did everything proper. He had an enormous ego -- any lesser ego would have given up. He publishes this stuff and nobody pays attention for four years, but he is possessed -- and that's what makes him hell to be with as a human.

Not only the studying and writing of history but also the honoring of it both represent affirmations of a certain defiant faith - a desperate, unreasoning faith, if you will-but faith nevertheless in the endurance of this threatened world-faith in the total essentiality of historical continuity.

Mr. Brown was writing a novel, and these kinds of finer details of history presumably weren't at the forefront of his mind.