Even some world-famous philosophers get off to an unpromising start. When John Locke was at Oxford, he sat "prating and troublesome" while his fellow students diligently took notes. But this "turbulent spirit" was so impressed by the lectures of the physician Thomas Willis that he wrote hundreds of pages describing the anatomy of brains and nerves. Unlike many of his predecessors, Willis believed that the soul lies not in the [...]

Great Britain needs great art - or so Benjamin Robert Haydon believed. Haydon successfully urged the government to buy the Elgin marbles in 1816, but condemned the vogue for portraits initiated by Joshua Reynolds. Portraiture, sneered Haydon, is "one of the staple manufactures of the Empire. Wherever the British settle, where they colonise, they carry and will always carry trial by jury, horse racing, and portrait painting." But when Reynolds [...]