To declare, as Walt Whitman did, “I am large. I contain multitudes,” is fair for a poet. But it poses something of a challenge for a biographer. The life of James Lovelock (pictured), an English ...

LONDON — James Lovelock, the British environmental scientist whose influential Gaia theory sees the Earth as a living organism gravely imperiled by human activity, has died on his 103rd birthday.

This biography by Jonathan Watts, The Many Lives of James Lovelock, could just as well be titled “A Life of the Many James Lovelocks”. Everyone liked one or another James Lovelock. He was widely—too ...