“Male, of middle or upper-middle parentage, preferably Jewish” was Hans Eysenck’s notorious sketch of a ‘genius’. The world has largely agreed, from da Vinci and Tolstoy to the Beatles and Elon Musk. In The Genius Myth, a Guardian and FT Book of the Year, Helen Lewis unpicks the allure of the lone male prodigy and the damage the myth can do. Following her bestseller Difficult Women, she joins Authenticity author Alice Sherwood to explore who gets called a genius – and why.
