I did not discover the music of Joy Division until a few years after the death of their lead singer, Ian Curtis, but it was love at first sight. Songs of doomed romance like ‘Love will tear us apart’ expressed what most troubled teenagers were feeling. Never was the gloom and despair and solipsism of… Read More from Ian Curtis
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Eric Sykes
Eric Sykes was a British comedian, actor and scriptwriter, who became deaf at an early stage of his career, and who continued acting into his eighties, by which time he was also nearly blind. He was a pioneering British example of how disability need make no difference to success. Sykes was born in Oldham, Lancashire… Read More from Eric Sykes
Samuel Johnson
A brilliant man of humble origins, who is barely remembered and less appreciated, Johnson wrote the most famous of English dictionaries, and a wealth of other critical and creative contributions, despite struggling with both poverty and a range of health conditions. Samuel Johnson was born in Lichfield, son of a bookseller, on September 18, 1709. … Read More from Samuel Johnson
Nicholas Owen
“I verily think no man can be said to have done more good of all those who laboured in the English vineyard. He was the immediate occasion of saving the lives of many hundreds of persons, both ecclesiastical and secular.” Father Gerard Richard Coles, singer, broadcaster and vicar, keeps his fans and friends intrigued by sharing… Read More from Nicholas Owen
Winston Churchill
“Only a man who knew what it was to discern a gleam of hope in a hopeless situation, whose courage was beyond reason, and whose aggressive spirit burned at its fiercest when he was hemmed in and surrounded by enemies, could have given emotional reality to the words of defiance which rallied and sustained us… Read More from Winston Churchill
Edward Lear
How pleasant to know Mr Lear! Who has written such volumes of stuff! Some think him ill-tempered and queer But a few think him pleasant enough. As a child, it was Edward Lear’s limericks and nonsense rhymes which first entertained me. The Owl and the Pussycat remains one of my favourite poems. As an adult, I was… Read More from Edward Lear
Virginia Woolf
“As an experience, madness is terrific I can assure you, and not to be sniffed at; and in its lava I still find most of the things I write about. It shoots out of one everything shaped, final, not in mere driblets as sanity does.” I never thought I would like Virginia Woolf: I thought… Read More from Virginia Woolf
Horatio Nelson
Who is the greatest British military leader of all time? Which disabled person prevented the invasion of England? Who was the most heroic naval commander in our history? The answer could only be Nelson, the man of contrasts: a man of high ideals, who abandoned his wife for a floozy; a person of supreme courage,… Read More from Horatio Nelson
John Milton
“A good book is the precious lifeblood of a master spirit, embalmed and treasured up on purpose to a life beyond life” (John Milton, Areopagitica) Perhaps the greatest ever unread English poet? At school, Milton was on the English syllabus alongside Shakespeare, and so we studied two books of Paradise Lost for A Level, just as we… Read More from John Milton
Isaac Newton
“I know not what I appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the sea-shore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell, whilest the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.” Born prematurely, and abandoned… Read More from Isaac Newton