BOOK REVIEW / Paperbacks: The Private Lives of Albert Einstein - Roger Highfield and Paul Carter: Faber, pounds 8.99

If relativity is a way of seeing the world not as events but as relations, Einstein's own life now gets the same treatment from two journalists who set out, with much publicity, to dig the dirt on one of the secular saints of our age. In fact, while giving us a full and not ill-written biography which aims to pay due consideration to three Mrs Einsteins - mother and two wives -they uncover nothing scandalously new. Einstein's first wife Mileva did not, as has sometimes been alleged, co-discover relativity, although the extent of her help with his experiments has been overlooked in the past.

Evidence for Albert's later philandering is thin. At worst he was a flirt.

Not a saint, certainly; just a human being.