As John Arthur notes, his book Brilliant Lives: The Clerk Maxwells and the Scottish Enlightenment is not so much about the Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwell (1831–1879) as it is about his antecedents—or rather about the remarkable background that helps explain his singular contributions and place in history. It is also a work of family history in that it seeks to understand its subject in terms of lineage and kinship networks. The accomplishments of Maxwell (common usage drops the first half of his name) in electromagnetism and statistical mechanics regularly place him on lists just behind Einstein and Newton in importance, though he is still not particularly well known outside of Scottish studies circles and the physics community. With Brilliant Lives, Arthur certainly seeks to remedy this obscurity through vigorous advocacy for Maxwell's significance, but he largely concentrates on the question of what kind of a family would produce such a scientist. Was Maxwell a sui generis mind, or can we find some explanation for his genius in his genealogy? Arthur contends the latter, and to this end provides an extremely detailed description of the Clerk Maxwell family's place in Scottish history.

Arthur begins with extensive genealogical tables and then provides a fifty-page treatment of Maxwell's life and work. The life writing draws heavily on the Campbell and Garnett biography of 1882 and does not provide much that is new. The meat of the book, however, is Arthur's encyclopedic coverage of five generations of Maxwell's family. It is a fairly complicated story (jumps back, forth, and sideways in time are needed) of Jacobite rebellions, legal wrangling over estate ownership, and questionable marriages. We find the origin of the Clerk Maxwell compound name in maneuverings required for ensuring the inheritance of lands by particular members of the family. The reader is provided with extreme details, such as who rented the house where Maxwell was born over the course of nearly sixty years.

Brilliant Lives is the result of a prodigious amount of research. Arthur does a good job reconstructing complicated events from often fragmentary records. However, it is not always evident how the family history provided helps us understand Maxwell better. The influence of Maxwell's father on shaping his ideas and outlook is fairly clear (and has been noted before), but it is challenging to find similar threads over the course of these five generations. Similarly, the book's subtitle suggests that the story of the Clerk Maxwells will help illuminate the Scottish Enlightenment. Unfortunately, we do not learn much about the Scottish Enlightenment that is not already widely known, and in fact we come away feeling that Clerk Maxwells are not particularly representative of the era. Some closer connection with the scholarly literature might have been useful here: the first source cited on the Scottish Enlightenment is a 1986 travel guide for Edinburgh, the second a Wikipedia article.

Those readers interested in Maxwell's family will certainly find this book interesting. The extraordinary amount of detail and archival work will also probably be useful for anyone studying eighteenth- to nineteenth-century Scottish genealogy or the lives of the landowning classes. It is a rich (if in some ways old-fashioned) portrait of a family line that has an especially bright culmination in the Victorian era's most important physicist.