Not very much has been written about Dirac, and there is even less material that is accessible to the general reader. This is perhaps understandable, given Dirac’s reclusive nature, his lack of involvement in politics, culture, and social life, and his highly abstract contributions to fundamental physics. All the same, there are sources that illuminate not only his works in physics, but also his life and thoughts more generally. Two of these sources stand out as the only full-scale biographical memoirs. The one by Helge Kragh titled Dirac: A Scientific Biography (1990) integrates Dirac’s life and his many contributions to the physical sciences, including the philosophical views of this most unphilosophical scientist. On the other hand, Graham Farmelo’s 2009 book, The Strangest Man, pays relatively little attention to Dirac’s physics, but describes very richly and innovatively his personality and relations to family and friends. While these two books are by far the most detailed and informative sources about Dirac, it is still worth consulting some of the physicists’ own writings, which appeared shortly after his death. Richard Henry Dalitz and Rudolf Ernst Peierls, two distinguished physicists who knew Dirac well, wrote, in 1986, an authoritative and non-technical account of Dirac’s life and career, Paul Adrien Maurice Dirac, Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the Royal Society. Another interesting and readable account appears in a chapter in Abraham Pais’s 2000 work, The Genius of Science: A Portrait Gallery. Kursunoglu and Eugene Wigner (1987) as well as John Taylor (1987), wrote memorial anthologies that contain a mixture of physics and biography, including many of the anecdotes told about Dirac (see index below). Peter Goddard’s 1998 book, Paul Dirac: The Man and his Work, is yet another example of this genre, which is addressed primarily to physicists.

While most of the scientifically oriented literature on Dirac focuses on his work in quantum theory, Kragh’s book mentioned above pays attention to his unorthodox cosmological theory based on the assumption of varying gravity. This subject is also covered in Kragh’s 2015 fictional interview, Masters of the Universe: Conversations with Cosmologists of the Past.