Imagine a man whose list of admirers reads like this:
- poets and writers of the order of Lord Byron, Leigh Hunt, Thomas Love Peacock, Mary Shelley, Keats, Robert Browning and Thomas Hardy
- social activists, no less than Henry David Thoreau, Leo Tolstoy, Karl Marx, Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr,
- intellectual giants on the scale of Oscar Wilde, George Bernard Shaw, Bertrand Russell, WB Yeats and Aldous Huxley