Fred hoyle applied his creative genius to an extraordinary range of problems and worked in a variety of genres. His research covered topics from the solar system to the entire universe. Everything interested him: the Sun, stars, interstellar dust, galaxies and cosmology. He even strayed into political and social science, climate change, archaeology, palaeontology and molecular biology. He exploited every medium available – research papers, monographs, science fiction, children's books and textbooks – to get his messages across. Any opportunity to make a radio or television broadcast delighted him, as did giving popular lectures, which attracted huge crowds. Most of the time he worked like a grasshopper in summer, jumping abruptly from one thing to another. In recounting his scientific career, it is inevitable that the narrative must by turns advance and backtrack. Take, for example, his work on accretion, on cosmology and on astrophysics: these all overlap in time, but they are largely disconnected in intellectual terms. For that reason, I have generally chosen to cover one area of research at a time, considering together clusters of related papers and books. We now turn to his investigations on the evolution of stars, which began just before the war and remained an important theme in his work until the mid-1960s.

Most productive scientists today write their papers on a computer. Hoyle's working method was no different from that of scholars the world over before the age of computers: pen and paper.