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John Rawls
Many of us feel that our societies are a little – or even plain totally – ‘unfair’. But we have a hard time explaining our sense of injustice to the powers that be in a way that sounds rational and...
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William Morris
The 19th-century designer, poet and entrepreneur William Morris is one of the best guides we have to the modern economy – despite the fact that he died in 1896 (while Queen Victoria was still on the...
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La Rochefoucauld
There’s a belief that philosophy, when properly done, should sound dense, forbidding, a little confusing, as if it might have been awkwardly translated from the German. But at the dawn of the modern...
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Virginia Woolf
Virginia Woolf was a writer concerned above all with capturing in words the excitement, pain, beauty and horror of what she termed the Modern Age. Born in 1882, she was conscious of herself as a...
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Coco Chanel
The world of fashion can seem very silly. It can come across as intensifying vanity and encouraging snobbery; it distributes prestige in unhelpful ways. This skittish, narcissistic side of fashion is...
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Donald Winnicott
How do you build a better world? There are so many well-known, urgent places you might start: malaria, carbon emissions, tax evasion, the drug trade, soil erosion, water pollution… Donald Winnicott...
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Matthew Arnold
Matthew Arnold was the most important educational reformer of the 19th century. He realised that, in the modern world, education would be one of the keys to a good society. But it had to be education...
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Emile Durkheim
Emile Durkheim is the philosopher who can best help us to understand why Capitalism makes us richer and yet frequently more miserable; even – far too often – suicidal. He was born in 1858 in the little...
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Melanie Klein
Melanie Klein (1882-1960) was a highly creative and original Viennese Jewish psychoanalyst who discovered the work of Freud at the age of 26 and devoted her life to enriching and nuancing it in...
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Henry David Thoreau
Most of the time, successful modern life involves lots of technology, constantly being connected with other people, working very hard for as much money as possible, and doing what we are told. These...
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Louis Kahn
Modern architecture produces truly innovative work: glittering, staggeringly tall buildings, opera houses that look like folded origami, even museums that look like spaceships. However, in turning...
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Oscar Niemeyer
One of the most depressing aspects of travel is finding that the world often looks the same in many different places. The towers of downtown Tokyo are indistinguishable from those of Frankfurt or...
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Michel de Montaigne
We generally think that philosophers should be proud of their big brains, and be fans of thinking, self-reflection and rational analysis. But there’s one philosopher, born in France in 1533, with a...
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Confucius
We know very little for certain about the life of the Chinese philosopher Confucius (a westernised version of his name, which means ‘Master Kong’). He is said to have been born in 551 B.C. in China; he...
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Leo Tolstoy
Leo Tolstoy was a believer in the novel not as a source of entertainment, but as a tool for psychological education and reform. It was, in his eyes, the supreme medium by which we can get to know...
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Edward Hopper
Edward Hopper is a painter of gloomy-looking paintings which don’t make us feel gloomy. Instead, they help us to recognise and accept the loneliness that so often lies at the heart of sadness. In his...
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Henri Matisse
The cultural elite gets nervous about cheerful or sweet art. They worry that pretty, happy works of art are in denial about how bad the state of the world is and how much suffering there is in almost...
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John Ruskin
John Ruskin (1819-1900) was one of the most ambitious and impassioned English social reformers of the 19th century. He was also – at first sight – a deeply improbable reformer, because he seemed to...
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Thomas Aquinas
It seems, at first, weird that we might learn from him. Thomas Aquinas was a medieval saint, said in moments of high excitement to levitate and have visions of the Virgin Mary. He was much concerned...
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Anna Freud
‘Defensive’ behaviour is at the root of a lot of the trouble we have with ourselves and others. It leads us to direct blame inaccurately, to hear reasonable criticisms as cruel attacks and to resort to...
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