A series of well written anecdotes covering about a decade in the life of physicist Michael Beard. Various entertaining descriptions, often little short of farce, of his fifth marriage falling apart in much the same way as the first four, the cover up of an accidental death with a murder, the inability (and unnecessity) of a Nobel prize winner to do any new work, how women can’t do physics, ruminations on the impossibility of diet and exercise, also tidying up, and plenty more, though it’s women and food Beard comes back to most often. I put the book down a couple of times while reading it and my main complaint is that I didn’t feel any better off finishing the story at the end of the book than I was if I had left it on a random page where I fell asleep. On the whole I enjoyed the book, Beard is so unlikeable you almost like him for it, but it didn’t seem to add up to anything in the end.