Physics World is not in the habit of reviewing books by non-physicists, but when the author was married to one of the most famous physicists of the 20th century, we can make an exception. In this book, Jane Hawking – who was Stephen Hawking’s wife for 30 years – spills the beans on her life with him, in an attempt to “exorcise the strain, the tensions and ultimately the overpowering toll of unhappiness” of that life.

She recounts in painful detail the long and often difficult struggle to support her husband’s battle with motor-neurone disease. There was the daily grind to look after Hawking and their young family, and the fight to obtain medical care for him. It was also far from easy being married to someone so focused on his work. She was made to feel second-string intellectually to her husband, and his firm atheism would often clash with Jane’s Christian faith. “It seemed that Stephen had little respect for me as a person and no respect at all for my beliefs and opinions,” she protests.

The problems mushroomed following the publication of A Brief History of Time in 1988. As Hawking’s fame grew, Jane felt increasingly bitter at being sidelined by everyone from college dons to journalists, who pushed her views aside as if they were of little interest compared with those of her husband. “Outside the marriage, and apart from Stephen, I was nothing,” she says. Ironically, it was Jane who originally encouraged her husband to write a popular account of cosmology and quantum physics.

The marriage reached breaking point when Hawking began a relationship with one of his nurses, Elaine Mason, in 1989. “Many factors – fame, fortune, diverging aspirations, priorities and outlook, as well as many people – had come between Stephen and me, and they proved stronger than the pull of home and family,” she explains. “I was cast aside in favour of someone who seemed to offer more constant and devoted nursing care and travel companionship than I ever could.” Hawking eventually filed for divorce and married Mason in 1995, and Jane herself later married a long-standing musician friend, Jonathan Hellyer Jones.

Although the tone of the book is often gratingly self-important and overblown, there are many intriguing insights into the family life of a celebrity physicist. For example, we are told how a succession of cranks – including one “Mr Isaac Newton” from Japan – would phone the Hawking household in the middle of the night, claiming to have solved the riddle of the universe and demanding to speak to “The Prof” to tell him where his calculations had gone wrong.

Indeed, the author takes a rather dim view of physicists in general. They might be “quite charming, friendly and down-to-earth” as individuals, but as a group have “a natural tendency…to slip inexorably into interminable discussion and arguments, almost always about physics”.