The Genius Myth by Helen Lewis: In search of genius? Don't look in East Anglia

What does it mean to be a genius? It takes more than extraordinary accomplishments or a high IQ.

Being a genius, Helen Lewis argues in her lively book, is as much about the society that has given the label as it is about the person themselves.

Tim Berners-Lee, for instance, is too self-effacing to play the role – but his invention of the World Wide Web underpins all the accomplishments of today’s tech bro ‘geniuses’.

The concept of genius has evolved. In Roman times, you could be possessed by a poetic muse, or ‘furor poeticus’. In the Renaissance, the idea of ‘great men’ took hold; the Romantics developed the notion of the genius as a garret-dwelling oddball who coughed up blood as he composed works of towering genius.

These days, our geniuses are mavericks who move fast and break things; they are still nearly always male. If every society has their own categorisation for genius, does the concept even exist?

Lewis has particular fun describing the lengths some have gone to crack the question. In 1904, the scientist Havelock Ellis came up with a list of just over 1,000 British geniuses.

People in East Anglia, he concluded, have ‘no aptitude for abstract thinking’, while those in south-west England are ‘sailors rather than scholars’. Dublin had produced 15 geniuses and poor Sligo none at all.

Later, the psychologist Catharine Cox Miles embarked on an eccentric project to estimate the intelligence of past geniuses, doling out an IQ based on the length of their entry in a biographical dictionary.

This was bad news for Cervantes and Copernicus, who were given an IQ of just 105; Goethe, meanwhile, scored 210. Shakespeare didn’t qualify.

In the 1990s, the psychologist Hans Eysenck decided there was enough data for a ‘rough portrait’ of genius. He (and it should ‘clearly’ be a he) should have a Jewish background, be born in February and lose a parent by the age of ten. He should die either at 30 or at 90, ‘but on no account at 60’. He should have gout.

Lewis is such a well-read guide to intelligence that at points you wish she’d been bolder. However, she is insightful on the loneliness of the very intelligent.

In the 1980s, high-IQ societies were asked for a name for their members. The most appropriate term they had was ‘outsider’.