Horatio Nelson (1758-1805)

Who is the greatest British military leader of all time? Which disabled person prevented the invasion of England? Who was the most heroic naval commander in our history? The answer could only be Nelson, the man of contrasts: a man of high ideals, who abandoned his wife for a floozy; a person of supreme courage, who was also insecure and vulnerable. As his contemporary Lord Minto said, "He is in many points a great man, in others a baby."

Horatio Nelson - or Horace as he was known - was son of a country parson in Burnham Thorpe, Norfolk, one of five boy and five girls . From his father, he inherited or learned a strong sense of piety. He was a small and delicate child, but full of fire. He learned to sail in nearby Burnham Overy (as did I, with less success, two centuries later). His mother died when he was nine, and four years later Horace was off to sea as a midshipman, thanks to his Uncle Maurice Suckling, a naval hero and later a man of influence at the Admiralty. Typically, Nelson suffered chronic sea-sickness throughout his career.

His famous injuries mainly came on land, rather than at sea. In 1794, bombarding the French at Calvi, on Corsica, a cannon ball struck the bastion behind which he was standing, and a splinter resulted in an injury, probably a detached retina, which left him blind in his right eye. Towards the end of his life he wrote "A few years must, as I have always predicted, render me blind. I have often heard that blind people are cheerful, but I think I shall take it to heart."

Nelson's bravery and lust for glory was evident at the Battle of Cape St Vincent in 1797, when his 74 gun ship engaged with three much bigger Spanish ships. Nelson boarded the first, then leaped across to another ship, shouting "Westminster Abbey! Or, glorious victory!" and forcing their surrender. Later the same year, attacking the harbour of Santa Cruz on Tenerife, grapeshot shattered his right elbow, leading to an amputation. Nelson complained at the cold knife, recommending the surgeon in future to warm the blade first. Afterwards in despair, Nelson wrote to his commander, Admiral St Vincent with his unfamiliar left hand:

"I am become a burthen to my friends and useless to my country. When I leave your command I become dead to the world. I go home and am no more seen... I hope you will give me a frigate to convey the remains of my carcass to England... A left-handed admiral will never be considered as useful, therefore the sooner I get to a very humble cottage the better and make room for a better man to serve the state."

For a naval hero like Nelson to be so mutilated was unusual. While destitute and injured sailors were familiar sights begging in the streets of England, their social betters usually avoided the thick of the fighting. But not Nelson, who both led from the front, but also showed great concern for the well being of his men, and advocated for them to have state pensions.

Nelson's status as a national hero was confirmed by his brilliant victory over the French at Aboukir Bay in 1798 after Napoleon had landed his army in Egypt. By sailing his smaller vessels between the French line of battle and the shore, Nelson was able to achieve a devestating victory. All but two of the French ships of the line were destroyed, marooning Napoleon in North Africa. Needless to say, Nelson was wounded again, when a shot fragment gashed open his forehead. Refusing to take precedence in the queue for the surgeon, he exclaimed "No, I will take my turns with my brave fellows." Such gallantry appears typical of the time. For example, the French Admiral De Breys had his legs shot away during the battle. He ordered tourniquets to be tied round the stumps and sat in an armchair on deck commanding the action until another cannon shot tore him in two.

Back home, there was patriotic rejoicing at the British triumph. The First Lord of the Admiralty fainted when he received the news, while Nelson's grateful monarch awarded him a Barony. In Naples, where he had begun an affair with Lady Hamilton, the ambassador's wife, a great ball was held in Nelson's honour. Among his many awards and presents was a clockwork revolving diamond plume for his hat, sent by the Sultan of Turkey.

Yet a German described meeting Nelson at Dresden, on his way home overland with the Hamiltons, writing "One of the most insignificant-looking fellows I ever saw in my life. His weight cannot be more than seventy pounds, and a more miserable collection of bones and wizened frame I have never yet come across." But landing at Yarmouth, Nelson was heralded as the Norfolk hero, and much celebration continued back in London.

Private life was rather more difficult. His wife Fanny was anxious and solicitous, whereas his mistress Emma was gushing and admiring. The affair was a scandal, and the king publicly snubbed Lord Nelson at court. Fanny wrote to him "I am sick of hearing of dear Lady Hamilton, and am resolved that you shall either give up her or me". When a baby, Horatia, was born to Emma in 1801, Nelson finally split with Fanny, and went off on another naval expedition to the Baltic, perhaps partly to escape his domestic problems

It was at the resulting battle of Copenhagen, where he felt his commander was being too cautious, that Nelson famously ignored the signal to discontinue action. Nelson said to his colleague "You know, Foley, I have only one eye - I have a right to be blind sometimes." He mimed putting the telescope to the wrong eye, saying "I really do not see the signal". His bold disobedience again triumphed, as 17 out of 18 Danish ships were captured, burned or sunk.

It was in 1803, now as Vice Admiral Viscount Nelson, that he was appointed to command the Mediterranean fleet, tasked with resisting the combined French-Spanish fleet. Napoleon was seeking naval supremacy, in order to safely invade England with his army.

The final battle came on 21 October 1805, off Cape Trafalgar. Nelson's plan was again bold: to sail his 27 ships in two lines directly at the enemy fleet of 33 French and Spanish first-rates. Having composed his final prayer - "I commit my life to Him who made me" - Nelson went up to stand on the quarter deck in dress uniform, complete with his decorations and the diamond plume on his hat, an obvious target for snipers. When his old friend Captain Hardy suggested he change to a plain coat. Nelson responded "he was aware that he might be seen, but it was now too late to be shifting a coat".

Soon after combat was joined, Nelson was hit by snipers on the Redoubtable, exclaiming "They have done for me at last, Hardy. My backbone is shot through". Nelson was taken below, covering his face with a handkerchief so as not to demoralise his men. As he lay dying, Hardy came down to share the news of total victory. Two thirds of the enemy fleet destroyed or captured, and not one British ship lost. Nelson said "Now I am satisfied. Thank God I have done my duty". Famously, Hardy kissed him farewell as he died, Nelson's final thoughts being for his mistress and daughter.

Joy at the naval success of Trafalgar was mingled with grief throughout the fleet. One sailor wrote "chaps that fought like the Devil sit down and cry like a wench". Back in England, Coleridge noted "When Nelson died, it seemd as if no man was stranger to another: for all were made acquaintances in the rights of common anguish". It was an event like the assassination of J F Kennedy or the death of Princess Diana, which united the nation.

As an eighteen year old in 1775, languishing with malaria after a voyage to India, Nelson had resolved "Well then, I will be a hero, and confiding in providence, I will brave every danger." He alway had a passionate belief in his own destiny. Three decades later, he more than fulfilled his ambition, through his charisma, boldness and what became known as "The Nelson touch". Now every October 21, the British navy drinks a toast to "The Immortal Memory". Countless pubs in Norfolk are named for their hero, including in Nelson's home village of Burnham Thorpe, where my own father is buried. It seems noteworthy to me that two of Britain's most celebrated military commanders - Nelson and Churchill - were disabled people. As Nelson wrote in 1804, "I really believe that my shatter'd carcass is in the worst plight of the whole fleet".

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (1742-1799)

"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 the aphorism has a central place in French thought - consider Pascal or La Rochefoucauld - my favourite aphorists are German: Friedrich Nietszsche, Karl Kraus, Walter Benjamin and Ludwig Wittgenstein. But the first place is reserved for the man who pioneered the aphorism in Germany, Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, who was also that country's first professor of experimental physics.

Born in Oberramstadt, the youngest of the seventeen offspring of a Lutheran clergyman, Lichtenberg was a weak and sickly child. He grew up with a malformation of the spine, perhaps due to tuberculosis, which made him a hunchback. He explained,

“My head lies at least a foot closer to my heart than is the case with other men: that is why I am so reasonable.”

During his life he had a multitude of real and imagined ailments, leading him to suggest:

"If Heaven should find it useful and necessary to produce a new edition of me and my life I would like to make a few not superfluous suggestions for this new edition chiefly concerning the design of the frontispiece and the way the work is laid out.”

Despite all this, he had many romances. His private life was unusual, and remarked on by his neighbours and contemporaries. For several years he lived with the teenage daughter of a weaver. After she died aged 18, he then took up with a washerwoman's daughter, with whom he had seven children, and whom he eventually married. But as he said

"Every man also has his moral backside, which he refrains from showing unless he has to and keeps covered as long as possible with the trousers of decorum"

Like another hunchbacked hero of mine, Antonio Gramsci, Lichtenberg jotted his thoughts into a series of notebooks, which he called "Waste Books":

"Tradesmen have their 'waste book' in which they enter from day to day everything they buy and sell, everything all mixed up without any order to it, from there it is transferred to the day-book, where everything appears in more systematic fashion ... This deserves to be imitated by scholars. First a book where I write down everything as I see it or as my thoughts put it before me, later this can be transcribed into another, where the materials are more distinguished and ordered."

However, Lichtenberg never published his approximately 4000 observations, of which perhaps the most famous is

"To err is human also in so far as the animals seldom or never err, or at least only the cleverest of them do so."

Nor did he create his own system of philosophy. However, his writing is perpetually stimulating and insightful. As Goethe said of him;

"We may use Lichtenberg's writings as the most wonderful dowsing rod: wherever he makes a joke, there a problem lies hidden."

One Lichtenberg aphorism, taken daily after breakfast, would be the dietary supplement I would prescribe to stimulate thought and ward off boredom.

Lichtenberg's career was spent as a mathematician and physicist at the University of Göttingen, where his lecture-demonstrations were immensely popular. I was delighted to learn that his students included Novalis, the German romantic poet immortalised by Penelope Fitzgerald in The Blue Flower. After teaching several young English aristocrats, Lichtenbeg was invited to visit Britain, after which he became an ardent Anglophile.

While in England, Lichtenberg became a great favourite of the King and Queen: it is said that on one occasion King George III (who was of course German himself), caused a great excitement by coming to Lichtenberg's lodging at 10am one morning and asking to see "Herr Professor" to continue their fascinating conversations.

In London, Lichtenberg marvelled at the acting of Garrick, and wrote a book which described Hogarth's engravings in meticulous detail. He shared Hogarth's fascination with people's behaviour and interactions: he has been described as a "spy on humanity."

Back home, Lichtenberg conducted scientific research into astronomy, electricity, and lightning:

"That sermons are preached in churches doesn’t mean the churches don’t need lightning rods.”

Among his experiments, he noticed and described the electrostatic principle that would lead to the invention of the photocopier 150 years later. The great Alessandro Volta paid him a visit to discuss electricity in 1784. But although elected Fellow of the Royal Society, Lichtenberg made no significant scientific discoveries himself, writing:

"I would have given part of my life to know what the average height of the barometer was in Paradise."

Aside from his disability, and his writing, I relate to Georg Christoph because he was as much a procrastinator, as a polymath: he never got around to writing his novel either. His little asides often anticipate other people's advances - as when he considers whether blind people might read letters with their fingers. Typically, although he probably was the first conceiver of the hydrogen balloon, he never got around to trying it out. Perhaps his lasting impact on the world was his proposal of what is now the standard paper size system (A3, A4, A5 etc). His Aphorisms deserve to be more widely known:

"Let him who has two pairs of trousers turn one of them into cash and purchase this book."

Further reading

Lichtenberg GC, Aphorisms, edited by RJ Hollingdale, Penguin Classics, 1990.

Stern JP, Lichtenberg: A Doctrine of Scattered Occasions, 1959.

Frida Kahlo (1907-1954)

"I am not sick. I am broken. But I am happy as long as I can paint."

A century ago, in the Blue House, on the outskirts of Mexico City, Frida Kahlo came into the world, destined to live a life of suffering, but also to be remembered as one of the greatest woman artists of all time. A great artist certainly, but perhaps not a particularly good painter? She was self taught, and in my opinion is one of those powerful artists - Goya is another - who may not be technically brilliant, but who succeed as a result of the frankness and originality by which they communicate their view of the world and its woes.

Her father was German; her mother was Amerindian. She liked to say that she was as old as the Mexican Revolution, and would write about the gunfire that echoed around the family home in her childhood. There is a theory that Frida was born with spina bifida: an American surgeon, Leo Eloesser did X rays in 1930, and concluded that this explained the decreased sensitivity in the lower part of her body. Aged six, Frida contracted polio, wearing colourful skirts to conceal her weaker right leg, and requiring a built-up shoe. In 1925, she was badly injured when the bus she was riding in crashed with a tram, breaking her spine, collarbone, pelvis, leg, foot, shoulder and being pierced in the womb by an iron handrail. She had up to 35 operations during her recovery, spent months confined to a plaster corset, and for the rest of her life, she had periods of extreme pain. She was also left unable to have a child. Not many people can boast - or lament - that they have a congenital impairment, an impairment acquired through disease, and an impairment as a result of a traumatic injury.

Originally interested in medicine, Kahlo began to paint to overcome boredom, when immobilised and convalescing. Later, she wrote to Diego Rivera, the leading contemporary Mexican artist, to ask him for advice. He not only encouraged her work, he also began a relationship with her which lead to marriage in 1929, against the wishes of her family. Their relationship was tempestuous - both had affairs, Kahlo with women as well as men, Rivera with Kahlo's sister Cristina, among others. They often lived separately. A macho woman with a feminine man, Kahlo always said that he loved her moustache and she loved his breasts. They divorced in 1939. They remarried a year later. Both communists, Kahlo and Rivera befriended Trotsky when he was exiled to Mexico - it is said that Kahlo had an affair with him too. But first and last, Kahlo was passionately in love with Rivera: "Diego: the beginning, builder, my child, my boyfriend, painter, my lover, my husband, my friend, my mother, me, the universe."

Kahlo's paintings often express her physical anguish, most famously in the 1944 image of "The broken column", featuring her in an arid landscape with a broken pillar for her spine, and nails stuck into her naked body. When Kahlo exhibited in New York in 1938, André Breton, who had organized the show, described her work as "a ribbon around a bomb", hailing her as a surrealist. In response, Kahlo said: "They thought I was a surrealist but I wasn't. I never painted dreams. I painted my own reality."

More than a third of her works are self portraits. She wrote: "I paint self portraits because I am so often alone, because I am the person I know best". According to her biographer Hayden Herrera, she was lonely, and she craved attention. At MOMA in June , I saw two great examples of the self portraits: Frida with her monkey on her shoulders, the monkey who was the substitute for the children she was unable to conceive with Diego Rivera; Frida in a man's suit, sitting on a yellow chair, scissors in her hand, close cropped and surrounded by strands of her black hair. Kahlo never hides her problems or her defects, from her heavy eyebrows and hairy upper lip to her physical impairments.

Throughout her life, Kahlo suffered neuropathic pain, becoming reliant on painkillers. In her last years, Kahlo was often sick: she suffered from leg ulcers, and was reliant on a wheelchair after 1951. After several unsuccessful operations, she had to have her right leg amputated below the knee in 1953. The last entry in her diary reads: "I hope the exit is joyful... and I hope never to come back". She died on 13 July 1954, from pneumonia. It is possible that she had taken an overdose of morphine.

Frida Kahlo's only Mexican exhibition came the year before she died. In the decades after her death, she was known mainly as the eccentric wife of Diego Rivera. With the growth in interest in Mexican art in the 1980s, she became increasingly famous in the English-speaking world, particularly after a major retrospective at the Whitechapel Gallery in 1982. She is the artist who gave painters permission to be personal: we could almost certainly blame her for Tracey Emin. In 2001, Kahlo became the first Hispanic woman to be the subject of a US postage stamp, and the biopic with Salma Hayek in 2002, based on the biography by Hayden Herrera, ensured worldwide fame. Now, her images are ubiquitous and she is an inspiration, in particular to Hispanics, to disabled people and to women, and to all who identify with her passion and her struggle. She has been described as the poster child for sorrow and for resiliency. As the Mexican novelist Carlos Fuentes has written:

"She is a figure that represents the conquest of adversity, that represents how - against hell and high water - a person is able to make their life and reinvent themselves and make that life be personally fulfilling... Frida Kahlo in that sense is a symbol of hope, of power, of empowerment, for a variety of sectors of our population who are undergoing adverse conditions."

Complete works

Further reading

Budrys V. Neurological deficits in the life and works of Frida Kahlo, European Neurology 2005, 55, 1

Herrera H. Frida: the biography of Frida Kahlo, New York, Harper Collins, 1983

PBS. The life and times of Frida Kahlo

Emily Dickinson (1830-1886)

At school, our English curriculum comprised the classics - Joseph Conrad, Tom Stoppard, King Lear, Chaucer - but with a healthy sideline in eccentricity - Ivor Gurney, Edward Thomas - to keep our fevered teenage imaginations interested. None more so, of course, than Emily Dickinson, the white-clad, ghostlike, hermit of Amherst, with her elliptical fragments of dash-punctuated verse. Eagerly we took her to our puzzled hearts, perhaps because there is something adolescent about much of her work - intense, self-indulgent, romantic.

I can still remember my favourite:

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 did well at Amherst Academy, where she was particularly interested in geology. At 16, she went to Mount Holyoke Female Seminary, the first women's college in America. Despite her recognized brilliance, she did not fit in, partly because she rejected the dominant Christian revivalist ethos. After periods of ill-health, she was removed from the college at the age of 17.

Emily spent the rest of her days in the family home, The Homestead, in the bedroom overlooking the graveyard. Although at first she would walk her dog Carlo, named after the dog in Jane Eyre, a book she particularly loved, she increasingly began to withdraw from society. For nearly thirty years she looked after her mother, herself an invalid. Her father created a conservatory for her, so she could experience nature without leaving the house: she was a great gardener and amateur botanist. In the last fifteen years of her life she became reclusive, and was protected and supported in her isolation by her father, by her sister Lavinia, and by her sister-in-law Susan "most beloved friend, influence, muse, and adviser" to whom many of the poems were addressed.

Solitary, but demanding of love and attention, Emily was a very active and demanding correspondent, sending her work out to friends for feedback. Her relationships with men were few, intense and conducted mainly through correspondence. Later in life, she had an intimate friendship with a local widower, Judge Otis Lord, reading Shakespeare together, flirting and even sitting on his lap, but when he asked her to marry him, she turned him down.

A recent account of the Dickinson family by Lyndall Gordon maintains that the secret of Emily's seclusion and spinsterdom might lie in epilepsy, a condition which is known to have affected other members of the extended family:

“Nature – sometimes sears a sapling

Sometimes - scalps a tree”

In 1851, aged 20, Emily had privately consulted Dr James Jackson of Boston. Gordon suggests that they spoke candidly about her condition, and that he advised a mode of existence that would mitigate her suffering, and offer her comfort and even fulfillment. Emily was prescribed a solution of glycerine-and-water, one of the nineteenth century nostrums for epilepsy, although at a concentration which suggests to Gordon that it was only ever intended as a placebo. Another doctor advised that it was better to avoid exposure to sunlight, which could exacerbate seizures:

“The Brain within its Groove

Runs evenly”

Until a “Splinter swerve”

The whole affair was kept secret, because epilepsy was at that time so highly stigmatized. The disease was associated with syphilis, masturbation, hysteria, even insanity, and it would have been shaming to the poet and her family had her disability been known. Because seizures might strike at any time with only a few minutes warning, it was better to hide from strangers. To avoid discovery or embarrassment, it was preferable to avoid close contact and never to marry - “by birth a Batchelor”. Becoming a reclusive writer was the ideal solution. Aged 43, she even remained in her bedroom during her father's funeral.

It was perhaps disability, then, which freed Emily Dickinson from the demands made on other late nineteenth century women - marriage, children, social obligations - and which enabled her to express and explore her unique voice. Certainly, many of the poems seem compatible with this suggestion:

"I felt a Funeral, in my Brain,

And Mourners to and fro

Kept treading - treading - till it seemed

That Sense was breaking through."

But retrospective diagnosis is always perilous, and we can never know for sure, as with many historical figures, whether we are justified in claiming them as disabled people.

The locked cherrywood chest against the wall of her bedroom began to fill up with poems, on scraps of paper, loose leaves, but also in 40 handmade booklets which were only discovered after her death, containing over 800 short poems. Poems about flowers, mysterious and passionate love poems, religious poems like demented hymns, and above all poem after poem about death:

"Because I could not stop for Death -

He kindly stopped for me -

The Carriage held but just Ourselves-

And immortality"

Among her influences - Elizabeth Barrett Browning, the Brontes, George Eliot - was the Book of Revelation. Independent in religion as in other areas of life, Emily was inclined to Ralph Waldo Emerson's transcendentalism, rather than conforming to local Protestant orthodoxy:

"Some keep the Sabbath going to Church –

I keep it, staying at Home"

Emily had made several efforts to get her work published, for example exchanging many letters with the critic Thomas Wentworth Higginson and with Samuel Bowles, the editor of The Springfield Republican, a local newspaper, but always with disappointing results. Higginson described the work to a friend as "remarkable, though odd... too delicate - not strong enough to publish." Her frank, obscure and passionate poetry was barely understood or appreciated by contemporaries, and only a dozen examples were published in her lifetime, and in toned-down versions.

After her death at age 55, probably from kidney disease, 1800 poems were discovered by her sister Lavinia. This extraordinary poetic legacy was fought over by her relatives, and particularly by her brother Austin's mistress, Mabel Loomis Todd, who was one of the few to recognise her genius. Todd co-edited a selected volume published in 1890, though with editorial changes to suit contemporary tastes. It took some years, together with much effort to restore the original versions of the work for the 1955 complete edition. By this time, Emily Dickinson had become recognized as one of the greatest, if not the greatest, of all American poets.

Further reading

Emily Dickinson, The Complete Poems, edited by TH Johnson, Faber and Faber 1975.

Lyndall Gordon, Lives like loaded guns: Emily Dickinson and her family’s feuds, Virago 2010.

John Milton (1608-1674)

"A good book is the precious lifeblood of a master spirit, embalmed and treasured up on purpose to a life beyond life" (John Milton, Areopagitica)

Perhaps the greatest ever unread English poet? At school, Milton was on the English syllabus alongside Shakespeare, and so we studied two books of Paradise Lost for A Level, just as we had studied two books of Virgil for Latin O Level, and with as little enthusiasm. Whereas I had been forced to memorise my Virgil to pass the exam, being an incompetent classisist, I cannot even remember which books of Paradise Lost we were to read. Only the opening, itself so Virgilian, remains familiar:

"Of man's first disobedience, and the fruit

Of that forbidden tree, whose mortal taste

Brought Death into the world, and all our woe"

I did remember that Milton saved his best lines for Satan, and was accused of "being of the Devil's party" as a result. We were scarcely enlightened, at my English public school, as to his Civil War radicalism.

Philip Pullman, in ransacking Paradise Lost for the framework and title of his own epic, His Dark Materials, did us all a service in reminding us that Milton is still there on the shelf, and perhaps worth reading for his own sake. In my case, a talking book took the 10,000 lines of blank verse - or at least the best bits - off the page and into my consciousness. And what a rich and splendid feast of imagery and language it is! I am sure someone else has already pointed out that John Milton is the first fantasy writer in the English language, creating imaginative worlds, complete with monsters, treachery, romance and suspense, three hundred years before Tolkien. In contrast to his peers, he used a wider vocabulary, freer and more exciting rhythms and above all no rhyming. Dramatic, irreverent (angels having sex?), could anything more ambitious be attempted than to describe the defeat of the rebel angels followed by the fall of man?

Like Tolkien, Milton was a language scholar, with Latin, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Italian and a little Dutch at his fingertips. Born in London, the son of a composer and scrivener of Cheapside, Milton went to Cambridge, where he thought student life of the time mostly foolish. In return, he was known as the "Lady of Christ's" due to his long hair. After college, which he found intellectually rather limiting, he continued to read widely in preparation for a poetic career. From 1638, he toured France and Italy for an extended gap year, meeting Galileo in Italy and I'm glad to note also spending time in Geneva. Returning to England, he became a polemical writer in the service of the Parliamentary cause, and after the revolution was appointed Secretary for Foreign Tongues in 1649, responsible for Latin foreign correspondence and with a sideline in anti-royalist propaganda, also in Latin.

Family life was turbulent: Milton was married three times, and was an early polemicist in favour of divorce on the grounds of incompatibility. Anne and Mary, his daughters by his first wife, rebelled against him - probably because he ignored their needs, no doubt also because he forced them to read to him in languages they did not understand. Samuel Johnson accused him of being severe and arbitrary and to have viewed women as inferior. When Milton married again, he did not bother to let his daughters know. Informed by a servant, Mary apparently replied, "that was no news to hear of his wedding but if she could hear of his death that was something".

By 1654, glaucoma had rendered John Milton totally blind, and from then on his poetry had to be dictated to helpers, who included the poet Andrew Marvell: it was in these conditions that he composed Paradise Lost, which finally appeared in 1667. In one of his shorter poems, On his blindness, Milton asks how he can now serve God, "When I consider how my light is spent", receiving the answer that to bear his "mild yoke" would be best, and concluding with the famous consolation that "They also serve who only stand and wait." Later, in Samson Agonistes, he would write of the Biblical hero

"But he though blind of sight,

Despised and thought extinguished quite,

With inward eyes illuminated,

His fiery virtue roused

From under ashes into sudden flame,"

The Restoration of the monarchy in 1660 saw him imprisoned for a time, and thereafter leading a quiet and impoverished life in London, retiring to rural Buckinghamshire for a year to escape the Plague. Milton's despair at the end of the Commonwealth is perhaps reflected in Paradise Lost's theme of man's fall from grace. Theologically, Milton was a sophisticated and independent thinker, and in his later life he came closest to Quakers in his approach to religion.

It's ironic, looking at the website for John Milton's cottage at Chalfont St Giles, to see that it celebrates "Royal Interest", from Queen Victoria who started the subscription list to purchase the property for the nation, to the half dozen current royals who have visited. Politically, John Milton was a supporter of regicide, a firm republican and an advocate of liberty, calling in the anti-censorship tract Areopagitica for " the liberty to know, to utter, and to argue freely according to conscience, above all liberties". A later radical poet, young William Wordsworth, would write a sonnet beginning:

Milton! thou shouldst be living at this hour:


England hath need of thee: she is a fen


Of stagnant waters: altar, sword, and pen,


Fireside, the heroic wealth of hall and bower,


Have forfeited their ancient English dower


Of inward happiness. We are selfish men;


Oh! raise us up, return to us again;


And give us manners, virtue, freedom, power.

Less lyrically, Terry Eagleton once maintained (to the tune of Land of Hope and Glory):

Chaucer was a class traitor

Shakespeare hated the mob

Donne sold out a bit later,

Sidney was a nob

There are only three names

To be plucked from this dismal set

Milton, Blake and Shelley

Will smash the ruling class yet.

Samuel Johnson noted that Paradise Lost was "one of the books which the reader admires and lays down, and forgets to take up again. None ever wished it longer than it is". Access to Milton's greatest work is now rather easier for lazy moderns thanks to audio book, which seems appropriate given that he never read it on the page himself. If there was ever a poem which benefitted from being read aloud, it was Paradise Lost.

Ernesto "Che" Guevara (1928-1967)

"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 the Irish rebels". Ernesto was diagnosed asthmatic at the age of two. Whereas his condition was chronic in Buenos Aires, when they moved to Alta Gracia, a dry highland province, it stabilised. His parents monitored his health, the humidity, his clothing and diet in an attempt to reduce the severity of the symptoms. Even as a child, it is said that he "showed an unusually strong self discipline by adhering to his asthma diets".

Often his parents made him stay at home, for fear of an attack. He became a precocious reader, as this was one of the only things he could do when asthma struck. The family home contained more than 3,000 books and Guevara read very widely in world literature, politics and poetry. He would make handwritten notebooks of notes and quotations from his favourite authors. Later, he was a prolific writer and diarist.

At school, he displayed a fiercely competitive personality, perhaps as compensation for his sickliness. Despite his illness, Guevara was an excellent sportsman - rugby, athletics, cycling, shooting were all activities into which he poured all of his energies.

In 1948, he began to study medicine at Buenos Aires University. In his vacations, he made his famous trips by motorcycle through Argentina, Chile and Peru. On these journeys, he encountered the poor and dispossessed - lepers, workers, peasants - with whom he identified and whose cause he subsequently passionately espoused. By 1953 he had graduated as Dr Ernesto Guevara.

In 1954 in Guatemala, he experienced the overthrow of the Arbenz regime by the CIA on behalf of the United Fruit Company, and this contributed to his hatred of American imperialism. At this time also, Guevara came into contact with Fidel Castro and other Cuban exiles. Subsequently, Guevara trained in guerilla warfare in Mexico, prior to the 1956 assault on Cuba with the band of revolutionaries who embarked aboard the Granma.

Commandante Guevara was second only to Castro in the revolutionary movement, and played a major role in the Cuban revolution. In the guerilla campaign in the mountains, the two contradictory sides of Guevara's personality were demonstrated: his love and care for his fighters, whom he helped to educate and entertain, but also his ruthlessness, for example in shooting informers, deserters and spies. As a military leader, he was intelligent and brave, with a tendency towards foolhardiness, according to his leader Castro. By 1959, the dictator Batista had fled and the Castro regime took over. In the following months, Guevara commanded the La Cabana prison, and was responsible for exacting revolutionary justice against the war criminals and others from the old regime. Commandate Guevara told the tribunals

“Don’t drag out the process. This is a revolution. Don’t use bourgeois legal methods, the proof is secondary. We must act through conviction. We’re dealing with a bunch of criminals and assassins.”

Several hundred prisoners were shot as Guevara watched from on top of a wall, lying on his back, cigar in mouth, to encourage the firing squads.

Che Guevara proved to be less effective as an economic leader than a military one. He became president of the Cuban national bank, with his signature "Che" on the bank notes signalling his distaste for money. However, he had more success with the Cuban Literacy Campaign, which taught more than 700,000 people to read and write. In 1962, he was one of the main architects of the Cuban Missile Crisis, when he was seemingly unconcerned at the risk of "millions of atomic war victims". Speaking at the United Nations in 1964, Guevara denounced apartheid, imperialism and the poverty of the Latin American masses. However, he rejected the pro-Soviet tendency in global and Cuban politics, and his thinking had moved towards a Maoist approach. Perhaps partly for that reason, he decided to leave Cuba

First, Che Guevara travelled to Congo, unsuccessfully trying to promote resistance to Mobutu. He blamed incompetence and in-fighting for the failure. After that, he offered his services to FRELIMO in Mozambique, but they were declined. In 1966, following his disappointments in Africa, Guevara disguised himself, and went to promote revolution in Bolivia. But perhaps because he favoured conflict to compromise, he was unable to develop good relations with local leaders. In addition, he was now up against the CIA and US Special Forces, his men lacked training and equipment, and his radio communications had failed. In the jungle, he became increasingly ill with asthma, having to make guerilla raids just to obtain medicine. Finally, he was taken captive by Bolivian special forces. On October 9, 1969 he was executed on orders of the Bolivian President. A half-drunken sergeant shot him nine times, so that the authorities could say that Guevara had been killed trying to escape. CIA men were in close attendance.

In death, Guevara became a hero. The photographs of his bearded corpse made him appear Christlike. Jean Paul-Sartre, Susan Sontag, Nelson Mandela and many others have regarded him as a hero and an inspiration, a man who was prepared to die for his beliefs. Thanks to the 1968 image by Jim Fitzpatrick, he became an icon of teenage rebellion and fashion chic. Reminiscent of his adolescent reading of Jack London, he was the epitome of the macho adventurer.

I became a schoolboy communist after reading Lenin and the Bolsheviks by Adam B Ulam, trying, like Ernesto, to cast off my bourgeois origins and express solidarity with the dispossessed. As an activist, it felt as if Guevara could be reclaimed as a disabled hero, a symbol for a movement with transformative aspirations and revolutionary rhetoric. Later, the darker side of Che Guevara's personality and actions became repugnant to me, just as the binaries of leftism and disability radicalism had become unconvincing.

In his last letter to his children, Guevara had written "Above all, always be capable of feeling deeply any injustice committed against anyone, anywhere in the world. This is the most beautiful quality in a revolutionary." In such quotations, Che Guevara indeed comes across as a symbol of freedom and compassion. Yet in practice, he was also a brutal man, capable of executing one individual or many in cold blood, without any qualms. An early fan of Nietszche, he embraced death and despised weakness. Some have suggested that his brutality may partly have been related to his disability. Because he had fought against his asthma, suppressed his own needs and triumphed through an act of will, Guevara showed no patience or forgiveness for the frailty of others. The man who trained as a doctor ended up as a ruthless killer.

Paul Klee (1879-1940)

Orson Welles contrasted Florence under the Borgias producing Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance with peaceful Switzerland only ever having produced the cuckoo clock. But Alberto Giacometti, Jean Tinguely and Paul Klee in the twentieth century alone refute Welles. The pedant might point out that although Klee was born in Bern and died in Locarno and had a Swiss mother, he inherited German citizenship from his father and was only accorded the privilege of Swiss nationality six days after his death. By the same token, it could be queried whether, if an artist is disabled for his last five years, he can be classified as a disabled artist? The same question could be asked of Francisco Goya, who became deaf in his later years. In both examples, as perhaps also with David Hockney's deafness, the disability has an impact on the work, although the art historians seem rarely to have acknowledged or discussed this aspect of the biography.

From the start, Paul Klee was a natural at drawing. He described it most memorably himself: "A line comes into being. It goes out for a walk, so to speak, aimlessly for the sake of the walk." Colour was more of a struggle. In the early years of the century he lived in Munich where his wife Lily gave piano lessons and he was a house husband and kept on with his art work. After travelling to Tunisia in 1914, he wrote "colour has taken possession of me; no longer do I have to chase after it, I know that it has hold of me forever." After 12 years of experiment he was now able, on 16 April 1914, to write in his diary "I am a painter".

During the First World War, he managed to avoid the fighting. In 1918, he was briefly involved in the Bavarian Soviet uprising, before fleeing to Switzerland. In the 1920s he moved to Weimar to teach at the Bauhaus school of art for 10 years.

Music was at least as important to Klee as painting, and early in his career it was not certain whether he would be an artist or a musician. He wrote: "I embrace the oil-scented goddess of the brush only because she is my wife" - but also that to him music was "my beloved". Paul Klee treated colours like notes in music. He said to his students at the Bauhaus "To paint well is simply this: to put the right colour in the right place." Rhythm too is of supreme importance in his work. The poet Rilke said in 1921 “Even if you hadn’t told me he plays the violin, I would have guessed that on many occasions his drawings were transcriptions of music.”

When the Nazis came to power, Klee was dismissed and the Bauhaus school was closed down. Later, he was labeled a degenerate artist. But Klee had already emigrated to Switzerland in 1933. In 1935 he contracted measles, and this developed into scleroderma, diagnosed in 1936. This condition is a chronic systemic autoimmune disease, predominantly affecting the skin, but also the heart, long and kidneys.

In the initial crisis, Klee's creative output fell away, but he then rallied to continue his prodigious output, with the year before his death being his most prolific. His movement now restricted, he could no longer simply "take a line for a walk", but a new sense of rhythm took over. The later work can be dark and threatening, perhaps influenced by his personal suffering as well as by the wider context of war. For example, in his last year, his "Eidola" series of drawings depict archetypal figures existing in a realm between life and death. Still, Klee's art retained its sense of childlike experimentation, for example in a painting like "Children's game".

In 1924, Klee had aspired to create a diverse and broad body of work "spanning all the way across element, object, content, and style". His success meant that he began many lines of enquiry which others went on to develop further. Beginning with his Bauhaus students, he was influential on many artists, from Joan Miro to Bridget Riley and beyond. He wrote extensively, responsible for many memorable insights on art, among which most famously

"art does not reproduce the visible, but makes visible."

I like particularly a photograph of Klee from 1935. He is standing next to his wife Lily, wearing his dressing gown and holding his pipe. He has the trace of a smile on his face, and his cat, Bimbo, is climbing down from his shoulders. His paintings are often suffused with a sense of joy, just as he once wrote "the picture has no particular purpose. It only has the purpose of making us happy". Perhaps for this reason, as Christine Hopfengart has written, Paul Klee's work is not only admired or valued, but is loved.