Helen Lewis The Genius Myth : The Dangerous Allure of Rebels, Monsters and

Longlisted for the 2025 Financial Times and Schroders Business Book of the Year AwardA Guardian, Financial Times, New Statesman and GQ Book for 2025 From the Sunday Times bestselling author of Difficult WomenBrilliant, timely and compulsively readable. Helen Lewis shows how the idea of genius has warped our understanding of human creativity and why people of vast accomplishment in one domain can prove so destructively clueless in others. OLIVER BURKEMANThe tortured poet. The rebellious scientist. The monstrous artist. The tech disruptor. You can tell what a society values by who it labels as a genius. You can also tell who it excludes, who it enables, and what it is prepared to tolerate. Taking us from the Renaissance Florence of Leonardo da Vinci to the Floridian rocket launches of Elon Musks SpaceX, Helen Lewis unravels a word that we all use without really questioning what it means. Along the way, she uncovers the secret of the Beatles success, asks how biographers should solve the Austen Problem, and reveals why Stephen Hawking thought IQ tests were for losers (before taking one herself). And she asks if the modern idea of genius a class of special people is distorting our view of the world. Lucid, funny and fascinating ADAM BUXTONAn indispensable companion to our times CAROLINE CRIADO PEREZ | Helen Lewis The Genius Myth : The Dangerous Allure of Rebels, Monsters and