style="overflow: hidden; color: #000000; background-color: #ffffff; text-align: left; text-decoration: none; border: medium none;">On April 11 1987, 25 years ago this month, the Italian writer and Auschwitz survivor Primo Levi fell to his death down the stairwell of the block of flats where he lived in Turin. The authorities pronounced a verdict of suicide. Levi’s chronicle of his captivity under Nazism, If This is a Man (published in Italy in 1947, and in the UK and US in 1959), remains one of the essential books of our age. However, Levi was not simply a witness to contemporary barbarism. By profession he was an industrial chemist. In much of his journalism, fiction and poetry he explored the border zone between science and literature. The republication of Levi’s literary-scientific memoir, The Periodic Table, provides an opportunity to appraise a figure who bridged the divide between the two cultures and became one of the most important and best-loved writers of our time.