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
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Janet Frame
The Lagoon, Janet Frame’s first volume of short stories, sat on my shelf for years. Only when I visited Dunedin, her home town, did I discover that it was that book, or rather the prize awarded to it, which saved the author from a lobotomy. On my last flight back to Europe from New Zealand,… Read More from Janet Frame
Jorge Luis Borges
“The history of the universe…is the handwriting produced by a minor god in order to communicate with a Demon.” If I ever had to choose my favourite author, it would be a difficult thing to decide between PG Wodehouse and Jorge Luis Borges. And I would defend the contention that they have much in common. Borges is… Read More from Jorge Luis Borges
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
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
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
Al-Ma’arri
In February 2013, as chaos raged through Syria, a small group of men from the Al Nusra front, the local Al Qaida affiliate, gathered in the town of Maari, near Aleppo. They were there to settle scores with the most distinguished sons of that town, one of the most famous poet of the whole Muslim… Read More from Al-Ma’arri
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
“To discover relationships and similarities between things that no one else sees. Wit can in this way lead to invention” The aphorism is the one pleasure in life where less is always more. I have always liked this literary form, which R.J.Hollingdale tells us must be brief, must be isolated, must be witty, and must be philosophical. Although… Read More from Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
Emily Dickinson
Exultation is the going Of an inland soul to sea, Past the houses – past the headlands – Into deep Eternity. Bred as we, among the mountains, Can the sailor understand The divine intoxication Of the first league out from land? Born to a typical New England bourgeois family, Emily was a sickly teenager, but… Read More from Emily Dickinson