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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Wilhelm II
Nearly twenty years ago, I reviewed Young Wilhelm, John Röhl’s extraordinarily detailed book about the early life of Kaiser Wilhelm II. Now, in the hundredth anniversary of the outbreak of the First World War, perhaps it’s an apt time to revisit this story for this blog. Born on 27 January 1859, Wilhelm was the eagerly… Read More from Wilhelm II
Ed Roberts
“If I’m going to be a vegetable, I’m going to be an artichoke, prickly on the outside, with a big heart in the middle” Before Ed Roberts contracted polio at the age of 14, he had wanted to be a marine, dragging his mother Zona to visit gun shops. After he recovered from the disease,… Read More from Ed Roberts
Rosa Luxemburg
When I was a politics student, it was the democratic socialists, not the authoritarians like Lenin who appealed to me, and in particular Rosa Luxemburg and Antonio Gramsci: both committed to freedom; both great writers; and both disabled people who paid a heavy price for their courageous work in pursuit of a socialist utopia. Rozalia… Read More from Rosa Luxemburg
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
Franklin D. Roosevelt
Who was the greatest ever American president? A good case could be made for Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who is undoubtedly one of the top three people to have held that office. In his first administration from 1933, he helped drag USA out of the Great Depression. He went on to became the only US president… Read More from Franklin D. Roosevelt
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
Georges Couthon
It was as a footnote in a book by Michel Foucault that I first encountered Georges Couthon, a leading light of the French revolution who had paraplegia. Since then, I have visited the Musee de Carnavalet in Paris several times to see Couthon’s wheelchair, a padded wooden contraption with a handwheel for propulsion, but despite… Read More from Georges Couthon
Helen Keller
“The public must learn that the blind man is neither genius nor a freak nor an idiot. He has a mind that can be educated, a hand which can be trained, ambitions which it is right for him to strive to realise, and it is the duty of the public to help him make the… Read More from Helen Keller
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