Clear, concise and accessible. And he leavens it further with occasional wry humor. "St Louis Post-Dispatch " Provocative and informed ... plenty of comprehensible analogies and no small amount of humor, often self-deprecating.... Best of all, the book is liberally sprinkled with well-conceived, gorgeously rendered and frequently whimsical illustrations. "Time" "From the Hardcover edition.""

Stephen Hawking is Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at the University of Cambridge, and is widely regarded as one of the most brilliant theoretical physicists since Einstein.