Tim Radford (1940-2025)

Tim Radford at an ABSW Awards Ceremony in 2011. Tim was the first person to be honoured with ABSW Lifetime Achievement Award, in 2004.

"No one will ever complain because you have made something too easy to understand”… and here is another thing to remember every time you sit down at the keyboard: a little sign that says "Nobody has to read this crap."

Some of the advice in Tim Radford’s enduring ‘25 commandments for journalists’, underlines why this four-time winner of an ABSW award was regarded as one of the great science journalists of his generation. When Tim ran a science writing masterclass, Ed Yong likened it to 'Yoda offering Jedi skills 101'.

Born in New Zealand in 1940,  Tim joined the New Zealand Herald as a reporter at 16 and moved to the United Kingdom in 1961. Aside from a spell as a Whitehall information officer, he spent his professional life working for newspapers, notably The Guardian, though contributed to The Lancet, New Scientist, London Review of Books and more.

Tim was as at ease interviewing a Nobel laureate for literature as he was gossiping with a Nobel prize winner for physics. Not only was he the Science Editor of The Guardian, he was also the letters editor, arts editor and literary editor over the three decades that he worked at the newspaper. He also contributed to The Guardian’s most successful April Fool’s joke, their ‘San Serriffe supplement’. His range was extraordinary.

A formidable intellect, Tim was a genial company and never tried to impress: it is just that, sharing a bottle of red as he puffed his roll-up, I quickly learned that he was much better read than me, more eloquent and much funnier too.

Roger Highfield (in the front), Tim Radford (behind Roger), Saul Nasse and Carmen Pryce at the Scientists Meet the Media party, at the Royal Society, in 2018 - Photo by Roger Highfield

Tim was living proof that, armed with enough curiosity and a great turn of phrase, you can be a brilliant science populariser, even without a degree in science. He was always generous and argued persuasively against the canard that scientists are hopeless communicators: “In response,” he said, “I can only say bosh, balderdash and Bronowski, and follow with other intemperate expletives such as Haldane, Hawking and Huxley, Eddington and E. O. Wilson, not to mention, as if in a state of terminal exasperation, Dawkins!”

The point is, he wrote, having encountered the likes of Carl Sagan and Primo Levi, if you can think clearly you can probably write clearly too.

Because of his wit and journalistic nous, Tim took part in endless debates about science and the media, not just in the UK but across Europe and beyond. I appeared with him at one event in Lisbon where we were delighted to find that our host in the British Embassy looked and behaved like Graham Norton, and we were surprised to be paid in an underground car park with envelopes stuffed with cash.

Tim wrote three books - The Crisis of Life On Earth (1990), The Address Book (2011) and The Consolations of Physics (2018). Reviewing the latter, his ‘Love Letter to Physics’, the biographer Graham Farmelo wrote that Tim was “a much-admired journalist: graceful, witty and adept at squeezing human interest from the driest maths.”

When I started out in journalism in the early 80s, it was Tim who gave me my first spot in a national newspaper. I was, of course, hopeless and it was only because he was kind, patient and encouraging that I limped into print in the Guardian’s Futures section. Tim, I’m eternally grateful for that first break and, now that you have met your final deadline, I have no doubt that there are many more journalists who are heavily in your debt. As Ian Sample remarked: “What a legend!”