In this elegant, erudite but entertaining book, Paul Strathern, the award-winning novelist and expositor of complex ideas, unravels the dramatic history of chemistry through the quest for the elements.Framing this history is the life-story of the nineteenth-century Russian Scientist Dmitri Mendeleyev, who fell asleep at his desk and awoke after conceiving the Periodic Table in a dream - the template upon which modern chemistry is founded, and the formulation of which marked chemistry's coming of age as a science.From ancient philosophy, through medieval alchemy to the splitting of the atom, this is the true story of the birth of chemistry and the role of one man's dream.AUTHORBIO: PAUL STRATHERN was born in London in 1940.He studied physics, chemistry, and maths at Trinity College, Dublin, before switching to philosophy.He is the author of several novels, including A Season in Abyssinia, which won a Somerset Maugham prize, and two highly successful series of short introductory books, Philosophers in 90 Minutes, and The Big Idea: Scientists who Changed the World.Paul Strathern lectures in philosophy and science at Kingston University.