Sir Barnes Wallis CBE became a household name after the hit 1954 film The Dam Busters in which Michael Redgrave portrayed a shy, slightly abstracted genius at odds with bureaucracy. Yet this was a simplified picture of a complicated, mercurial man.

Wallis' contribution to British aircrafts and weapons is legendary; from the R100 intercontinental airship and innovative aircrafts like the Wellesley and Wellington, to bombs that destroyed hitherto invulnerable targets, and variable-geometry aerodynes. In addition to playing a significant part in both world wars and the Cold War, his work and inventions extended to a radio-telescope, ships, bridges, prosthetic limbs, and a nuclear-powered submarine designed to travel the world's oceans in near silence.

Yet little has been written the private Wallis; the man who fell in love with his 17-year-old distant cousin-in-law when he was 34 - and thus began a love that lasted 57 years; the man who loved the British countryside and spent every spare moment rambling. Using previously unseen letters and diaries, Barnes Wallis brings to life one of Britain's greatest inventor's: a visionary genius and private romantic; an insufferable pedant and a doting and patient son; and a self-mythologising martyr and a loyal friend.