Professor Gerry Simpson has spent his career on the academic side of the law, teaching in the US, the UK and Australia, and writing books that deal with international law, war crimes, and the geopolitical power structures that define the world order.
Now, he is tackling something a bit closer to home.
His childhood was spent in a Scottish village built especially for scientists, specifically the nuclear scientists at the heart of the race for power that defined the Cold War. He is writing The Atomics: My Nuclear Family at the End of the Earth, a philosophical memoir of beaches, bunkers and a boyhood spent on an Atomic Estate at the edge of Britain. As Professor Simpson will soon be joining Irresistible as our Contributing Romance and War Crimes Editor, we were lucky enough to not only have a sneak preview of the book, but an exclusive interview with the man himself.
At the Byron Bay Writer’s festival at an after-hours soirée, Simpson jokes about being called Professor Lightweight by his London friends. It’s not an insult, he insists, but a compliment, ‘because they think I make serious things too accessible,’ he said.
Simpson’s childhood sounds like something from a Cold War novel. The estate he lived on in the shadow of a nuclear power station was designed so that if it exploded, not too many people would die. They had their own airstrip with three flights a year to London, and lived as a community that was a social experiment as much as a scientific one: an enclave of physicists and mathematicians trying to produce limitless, clean energy for the planet.
As a child, one of the fathers on the estate told him during a birthday party that in a nuclear attack, the last thing he would see would be a tiny spinning object, before everything went white. For a year he went to school scanning the sky for spinning objects.
That tension, between wonder and fear, faith in progress and dread of annihilation, runs through The Atomics: My Nuclear Family at the End of the Earth. It is, he says, an attempt to make sense of the strange blend of optimism and anxiety that shaped his childhood. It is also a fascinating lens through which to examine how global progress and world events land right on people’s doorsteps.
The Atomics sounds unlike your other academic books. Why did you want to write it?
Gerry Simpson: I’d written a lot of serious academic work, and I wanted to turn to something more personal. I grew up surrounded by scientists and secrecy — it felt normal until I left. The book is a way of looking back at that odd mixture of innocence and fear, but through humour. It’s about nuclear anxiety, yes, but it’s also about play, family, sandyachts, and trying to make sense of the absurdity.
It’s funny you mention humour — your work balances gravitas and wit. Where does that come from?
GS: Maybe self-defence. I call it enlightened seriousness: being serious about the world but light in how you hold it. People sometimes think that to be profound you have to be solemn — I don’t buy it. Humour can carry truth better than a straight face.
Your last book was called The Sentimental Life of International Law: Literature, Language and Longing in Global Politics. What does the sentimental mean for you?
GS: It’s about emotion — how people actually experience politics. We talk about rules and treaties, but global affairs are really about feelings: hope, grief, and longing. I wanted to write a book that admitted that. I wrote it partly for my daughters and my students — to say: yes, the world is messy, but you can still be hopeful.
You use literature as a lens for law. Why fiction?
GS: Because novels and poems tell the truth differently. They show what the law misses — loss, regret, the private interior of politics. I’ve always felt international law is too dry; literature restores the moisture.
The book is also intimate. You tackle family and grief.
GS: Yes. Part of it is about my late wife, Deborah Cass, an academic and writer at the LSE and University of Melbourne. She died in 2013 after a long illness but I discovered that the radiotherapy she had received may have had some link to the nuclear power plant my father worked at. So I wrote a very personal account of that treatment and that link to my past in the final chapter of the book, which is called Radiotherapy.
You also talk about masculinity and tenderness — an unusual topic and an unusual pairing for a war-crimes scholar.
GS: I know. But I think we need to reclaim a kind of feminised masculinity — confident, nurturing, unafraid of gentleness. A friend once said, ‘Do I hold the door or treat her as an equal?’ I told him, ‘Do both.’ It’s not complicated.
Gerry Simpson’s Reading List- Top 5
The Line of Beauty: Alan Hollinghurst
To Paradise: Hanya Yanigahara
Couples: John Updike
American Pastoral: Philip Roth
A Disaffection: James Kelman,
There’s a phrase you use – turgid solemnity – tell us more about that.
GS: Yes, that tone people adopt when they think seriousness equals moral weight. I prefer people and writers who dare to be ironic: Roth, Amis, Gaita. Humour isn’t disrespect; it’s precision. I try to use it in my own work. Freud said we need humour to talk about serious things.
If you had to sum yourself up in one line, what would you say?
GS: I would like it to be something like – He applied a light, ironic touch to serious matters.
Perfect. We’re looking forward to welcoming you as our latest Contributing Romance and War Crimes Editor
GS: My dream job. When do I start?
The Atomics: My Nuclear Family at the End of the Earth by Gerry Simpson. Exclusive Extract.
Then, as we grow older, our early lives become increasingly exotic to us. We compare notes, we read novels, we visit other – saner – families, foreign countries where the sun shines, where they do things differently. So, it wasn’t until much later that I came to understand that I had grown up in an experiment at the very cliff edge of the British mainland, at the end of the world (at the heart of an unfought nuclear war). How was I to know I’d grown up in what one writer has called “an extraordinary place at a rather extraordinary time.”
We were: The Atomics.
Gerry Simpson was appointed Chair in Public International Law at the London School of Economics in January, 2016. He previously taught at the University of Melbourne (2007-2015), the Australian National University (1995-1998) and the LSE (2000-2007), and has held visiting positions at ANU, Melbourne, NYU and Harvard. He is the author of Great Powers and Outlaw States (Cambridge, 2004), winner of the American Society of International Law Annual Prize for Creative Scholarship in 2005 and Law, War and Crime: War Crimes Trials and the Reinvention of International Law (Polity 2007), and co-editor (with Kevin Jon Heller) of Hidden Histories (Oxford, 2014) and (with Raimond Gaita) of Who’s Afraid of International Law? (Monash, 2016), and The Sentimental Life of International Law: Literature, Language and Longing in Global Politics (Oxford, 2021). Gerry is also a Fellow of the British Academy.
