THIS deceptive little book is ostensibly the tale of , best known in the UK as the man who discovered oxygen and in the US as a hero of the American revolution. But this isn’t just the story of how a provincial minister with radical ideas became one of England’s most important scientists and its most hated man, forced to flee to his friends in the US. It is also a compelling inquiry into the nature of scientific discovery.
As Johnson points out in the book, now published for the first time in the UK, Priestley and his…
