"Humble"?
Humble my arse. Even before "the book" he was a bit of a celeb. And I think he knew it. His late-80s undergraduate lecture series "A short history of the universe" was packed out with students from all subjects. I've still got the lecture notes somewhere in one of my boxes of crap^W valuable keep-sakes. IIRC it was during one of these lectures that he made a "joke" about what he was going to do with his Nobel Prize money, OSLT. It wasn't very funny and it certainly wasn't humble.
Not to mention his well-known propensity for mowing down people that got in his way on Trinity Street...
Biting the hand that feeds IT
