It’s a romantic tale: a young communist struggling against an authoritarian regime is arrested on a treason charge. A dramatic trial follows, and he is consigned to a long sentence, separated from his wife and family. In prison, he rallies his comrades, organizing education sessions. It could be the story of Nelson Mandela, except that… Read More from Antonio Gramsci
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Harriet Martineau
This week, the distinguished contemporary writer Ali Smith gave the inaugural Harriet Martineau lecture for Norwich Writers’ Centre, bringing alive a woman who in her time was ubiquitous, but who now is hardly known. Martineau was a political journalist, an early sociologist, a radical campaigner, a traveller and an author who inspired Charlotte Bronte, Charles… Read More from Harriet Martineau
Flannery O’Connor
“The fiction writer presents mystery through manners, grace through nature, but when he finishes, there always has to be left over that sense of Mystery which cannot be accounted for by any human formula.” Flannery O’Connor, who wrote some of the finest stories in the English language as well as two powerful novels, came from… Read More from Flannery O’Connor
Jean-Paul Marat
Maverick scientist, jobbing medic, sometime political philosopher, eloquent journalist, impassioned political activist – Marat was multifariously gifted but brutally extreme. He was born in Neuchatel, son of a Sardinian religious refugee, but left for the bright lights of Paris, where he studied medicine. He moved to London in 1765, where he began to write philosophical… Read More from Jean-Paul Marat
Ernesto “Che” Guevara
“The true revolutionary is guided by strong feelings of love. It is impossible to think of an authentic revolutionary who does not have this quality.” Ernesto “Che” Guevara Lynch was born in Misiones, a remote jungle backwater in Argentina to aristocratic but radical parents: his father said “in my son’s veins flowed the blood of… Read More from Ernesto “Che” Guevara
Paul Klee
Orson Welles contrasted Florence under the Borgias producing Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance with peaceful Switzerland only ever having produced the cuckoo clock. But Alberto Giacometti, Jean Tinguely and Paul Klee in the twentieth century alone refute Welles. The pedant might point out that although Klee was born in Bern and died in… Read More from Paul Klee
Florence Nightingale
“We want to rouse the interest of the public: for behind the Cabinet in England always stands the House of Commons & behind the House of Commons always stands the British public. And these are they we want to interest: and these can only be interested by narratives of real lives.” Although Florence Nightingale is a… Read More from Florence Nightingale