Fred Hoyle showed that stars manufacture all chemical elements and therefore we are all stardust. But Hoyle's s stormy relationship with the Establishment left him, ultimately, on the margins of science. As two biographies of Hoyle are published, Quentin Cooper reassesses the achievements of one of Britain's greatest 20th-century cosmologists and science communicators. The books' authors ask whether his uncompromising nature helped stimulate a new and cosmic expansion in British astronomy. Producer Tracey Logan