In a celebrated essay, Macaulay sums up Bacon's career as a "chequered spectacle of so much glory and so much shame." The words may fitly enough be applied not only to Bacon's life but to most men's lives and to most large experiments of human action. In 1942 I began to write a novel whose purpose was to trace the course of one such experiment from its beginnings in the eighties of last century up to our present time. I intended to call this novel,...