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BOMB, BOOK AND COMPASS: JOSEPH NEEDHAM AND THE GREAT SECRETS OF CHINA By Simon Winchester, Penguin, £5.99

If a vote were to be taken among historians and social scientists about the greatest achievement of scholarship in their field, chances are that the overwhelming vote would go in favour of Joseph Needham’s Science and Civilization in China, a work that runs into 24 volumes and occupied the author from the late Forties till his death in the Nineties. Each of the volumes, Needham said, was an exploration “of the limitless caverns of Chinese scientific history”. Simon Winchester writes about the man and the making of this magnum opus.

What is strange is that Needham was actually a trained biochemist, and a good one at that. He won his fellowship at Gonville and Caius College (of which he later became Master) as a biochemist. It was a visit to China, sponsored by the British government during the Second World War that sparked off Needham’s grand passion regarding the history of science in China. He travelled far and wide in China, learning about the country and collecting material. He was fluent in Chinese and a rather accomplished calligrapher in the language. Needham’s monumental work is testimony to the fact that there are no short-cuts in the world of scholarship. He worked hard and without pause on his great project.

It is not possible, appearances to the contrary, to accuse Needham of having tunnel vision. He was a scientist and a socialist; he loved the good life and the company of pretty women; he was a public campaigner of causes he considered to be just; he was also a nudist and a practising Christian. He combined with aplomb all these various activities with the research and the writing of his great book.

The praise heaped on his book is entirely justified for, as Winchester notes, very few flaws and errors have been discovered by subsequent scholars. Needham’s marshalling of facts and his reading of the records were unmatched. What was breathtaking was the way he classified and organized the voluminous material he had collected. The project was emphatically Needham’s own, but the work would not have been possible without the collaboration of other scholars. Needham was not only handsome in acknowledging these contributions, but also, at times, paid these collaborators from his own funds.

Needham was a Titan among scholars and Winchester through his painstaking research shows this very well. Yet Needham was not without feet of clay and it is here that Winchester falters, perhaps because he is, and justifiably, somewhat overwhelmed by his subject’s achievements in the world of scholarship. The fact of the matter is that Needham remained blind to the many atrocities perpetrated by the communist leadership in China. Neither did he speak out against the horrors of the Soviet Union. He accused the US of using bacteriological weapons in North Korea and never recanted. (When George Steiner, who had been commissioned to write a book on Needham, probed him on this issue, Needham turned cold and ensured that Steiner could not write the book.)

His great book naturally overshadowed Needham’s other writings. But his Time the Refreshing River was read with profit by a previous generation and contains many outstanding insights in the methodology of science and social science. Winchester brings out Needham the scholar par excellence of China.