5 things you (probably) didn’t know about Albert Einstein

• Albert Einstein: facts about his life, death, education and work
• Einstein on the run: when the brilliant scientist fled to England

Einstein’s militant pacifism in response to the First World War is well known. Less known is his change of mind in 1933, a few months after Adolf Hitler came to power in Germany, in favour of European military rearmament against the Nazi threat—long before most European and American politicians. In 1939, he even recommended to US President Franklin Roosevelt the building of an atomic bomb, thereby helping to launch the Manhattan Project in 1941–2. But after the Second World War, Einstein changed his mind yet again and fought very publicly against nuclear weapons. His last public act, days before his death in 1955, was to sign the anti-nuclear Russell-Einstein Manifesto, initiated by British philosopher Bertrand Russell.

• Darwin vs God: did the 'Origin of Species' cause a clash between church and science?
• From Charles Darwin’s beard to George Eliot’s right hand: 4 famous Victorian bodily quirks

In 1952, Einstein was offered the presidency of Israel, following the death of his long-time sparring partner, Chaim Weizmann. He turned it down, while simultaneously observing that his relationship with the Jewish people had become his “strongest human bond”. This decision was the culmination of three decades of ambivalence towards Zionism. Jewish by birth, and also by sympathy, Einstein always suspected that Zionism would encourage the use of violence. Although he raised money for the Zionist cause in the 1920s, and supported the foundation of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem—to which he willed all of his papers after his death—Einstein remained too much of an individualist to commit himself to any nation.

From the 1920s, Einstein was celebrated as a citizen of the world, partly as a result of his global lectures in Europe, Japan, Palestine, South America and the United States. But after he left Europe in 1933, and settled in Princeton, New Jersey, he never returned to his homeland. Indeed, he never left America before his death in 1955 – despite countless invitations to travel. Part of this reluctance was his undying distrust of his native Germany following the horrors of the Nazi period. In addition, Einstein had no wish to entangle himself in the politics of Palestine. But most of all, he loved solitude in Princeton for the sake of his all-important physics.

• What happened to Einstein's brain?
• The saga of the Einstein Tower

Einstein is one of the most widely quoted people of all time, and probably the most quoted figure from the 20th century. The website Wikiquote has many more entries for Einstein than for Aristotle, Galileo Galilei, Isaac Newton, Charles Darwin or Stephen Hawking, and even than Einstein’s opinionated contemporaries Winston Churchill and George Bernard Shaw—including an ever-expanding section of misquotations and invented ‘quotations’. Beyond science, Einstein was an avid commentator on education, marriage, money, the nature of genius, music-making, politics and more. As he seriously joked to a friend in 1930: “To punish me for my contempt of authority, Fate has made me an authority myself.”

Andrew Robinson is the author of 25 books in the arts and sciences. His latest, Einstein on the Run: How Britain Saved the World's Greatest Scientist, was published by Yale in September