'The Royal Society is a venerable, elite and prestigious organisation that has played a remarkable and often crucial role in the development of science policy and support in the years since the major economic and political crises of the 1960s. That more recent track record has never before been subject to properly detailed historical analysis. An authority both on the workings of the Royal Society and on the changing character of public science and its significance, Peter Collins offers an unprecedentedly well-documented and frank account of the way the Society changed in key periods of transformations in the sciences, their private and public funding, and their place in the social and economic worlds . Using unrivalled access to the principal personalities and to the records of the Society's activities, [he] has produced a book that will be valuable reading for anyone concerned with the political and public condition of British science and its development in the past five decades.' Simon Schaffer, University of Cambridge.