In 2007, Hawking published a children’s book, George’s Secret Key to the Universe, with his daughter, Lucy, seeking to explain the workings of the solar system, asteroids, his pet subject of ...

It turned Hawking into a celebrity and transformed his life. After 25 years of marriage and three children, Stephen and Jane Hawking separated and divorced. Stephen married his nurse, Elaine Mason.

His marriage to Jane, with whom he had three children, broke down after, as she put it, “fame and fortune muddied the waters and … took him way out of the orbit of our family.” Hawking ...

Written for a non-specialist audience, Hawking’s A Brief History of Time is the very definition of a smash-hit science book. It may be a joke (repeated by Hawking himself in h2g2) that it’s ...