“Even on the most solemn occasions I got away without wearing socks and hid that lack of civilisation in high boots.” So wrote Albert Einstein to his cousin and second wife Elsa, during a visit to the University of Oxford.
This nugget came to light when 1400 letters, donated to the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in Israel by Einstein’s stepdaughter Margot, were made public this week, 20 years after her death. “This is the last such collection of material that will be revealed,” says Hanoch Gutfreund, a physicist at the university.
The letters may help clear a blemish on Einstein’s…
