Gods, Mongrels and Demons : 101 Brief, Alternative but Essential Lives

This book, to quote its author, is based on the twin premises that the ‘oddballs, tinks, heidbangers, saints, keelies, nutters, philosophers, freaks and such like deserve to be drawn awhile from the periphery to the centre’ of our consciousness and that these apparently marginal lives are not only interesting in their own right, but often tell us more about the mores of a country or a time than the lives of its better known citizens (not that some of these are not included here too).

In what other book could such eminent figures as the Japanese poet Basho, the modernist artist Kurt Schwitters, the baseball star Babe Ruth, the singer Billie Holiday and the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein rub shoulders with the likes of Anancy, Ganesh, Johnny Faa, Billie the Kid, Eliza Donnithorne (the true-life model for Dickens’ Miss Havisham) or the Swiss air aces with a higher pro rata strike rate than the RAF in the Battle of Britain. Not to mention Henri Cochet – the sublime playboy tennis star who found himself two sets and forty-love down in the fifth game of the third set of the Wimbledon men’s final in 1927 and went on to win the championship.