Walter Isaacson's biographies of genius

Walter Isaacson has built a career on biographies of people who changed how the rest of us live, and three of his are the ones I keep coming back to.

Steve Jobs shows Jobs at his worst as well as his best. I read this quite early on in my life and what stood out for me was Jobs ability to relentlessly cut out distraction as a hallmark of a great leader. Apart from learning about his life you also get a peak into the traits which made him special.

Leonardo da Vinci treats Leonardo’s restless curiosity as the real subject. It works through the notebooks, the half-finished commissions and the dissections rather than just cataloguing the paintings. Slower than Jobs, and worth the patience.

The Code Breaker is the most recent. It follows Jennifer Doudna and the invention of CRISPR gene editing: part biography, part crash course in the biggest scientific story of the decade.

Different centuries, same underlying question: what obsessive curiosity looks like up close.