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Marie Curie was perhaps the most important woman scientist of the 20th century. Barbara Goldsmith’s absorbing biography, Obsessive Genius (Phoenix, £8.99), lays bare both the public world of her scientific endeavours and the inner world that propelled her. It covers everything from her path from radium to sonar, to her winning two Nobel prizes in spite of being so affected by public criticism about her personal life that she was taken away from France, with the help of suffragette friends, to recover in the UK.