Tomalin talks of the “bursting, disorganized, uncontrollable quality of his experience”. Her achievement is to organise, control and give it context, without tarnishing its shine. All her excellent research is lit by Pepys’s self-revelations. Her biography develops into a vivid chronicle of contemporary history seen through the all too human preoccupations of this ordinary, and extraordinary, man.Diana Souhami’s ‘Selkirk’s Island’ won the Whitbread Biography Award.Lisa Jardine and Claire Tomalin will be appearing at the Cheltenham Festival on 13 and 11 October respectively. On a Grander Scale: the outstanding career of Sir Christopher Wren

Sir Christopher Wren’s greatness is embodied in St Paul’s cathedral, an architectural masterwork that took 40 years to complete. Lisa Jardine’s new biography puts that stunning but singular achievement in a much richer perspective, and one that can only be properly experienced by going clubbing with “the chymical brothers”.

Wren’s early, exceptional, brilliance did not guarantee an A-stream progress through life. Nor did his father’s position as Register of the Order of the Garter, an “advantage” that in the late 1640s became a liability after Charles I was forced to go walkabout by Parliament. Courtly royalists such as the Wren family found themselves rudely straitened. But brilliance, like the stars that were Christopher’s first and last loves, carries potent gravity.
It is this gravity that Jardine explores, to place Wren in the stellar context of other great minds – notably of Wadham College, Oxford – with which he traded ideas from an early age. His success depended not just on original polymathic thinking but carefully engineered patronage – and personal charm. When, at 17, he wrote to Charles Louis, the Elector Palatine, about his precocious discoveries, his faultless politesse was obvious. To the gizmo-susceptible Elector he presented “that Devotion towards your Highness, which I conceived while yet a Child, when you were pleased to honour my father’s House by your presence for some Weeks”.Rather Blackadder-ish, that.

So, too, is Jardine’s occasionally over-zealous quotation from sources. Tracing Wren’s mysterious movements during a visit to the Continent, she suggests he may have travelled to Villa Klarenbeeck in Holland. We are then subjected to two achingly dull poems about the place.Fortunately, much of the painstaking research which drives this biography is not painful to the reader. But it is a mystery tour which effectively starts with the “littlenesses” given to the Elector (drawings of mites, a corn-drill and a “double-writing machine”) and ends with the St Paul’s saga. In between lies a complex tale whose keynote is survival; not only Wren’s, but that of several monarchs, and of the pursuit of science at a crucial time.This is what the title is all about. We learn as much – in some cases, more – about other scientific “virtuosi” and “club-men”, and the braid of political machinations that entangled them, than we do about Wren; a bonus, this.