William Congreve
“Heaven has no rage, like love to hatred turned,
Nor Hell a fury, like a woman scorned.”
Congreve (1670 - 1729) is best known for the 1700 play The Way Of The World. Raised in Ireland he was best mates with Jonathan Swift (writer of Gulliver's Travels). He achieved huge success with is first five plays but the taste of the English public changed and the sexual comedy of manners he was so brilliant at writing became Last Year's Thing. So, he went in to politics. Which was a shame.
Germaine Greer
“Love, love, love - all the wretched cant about it, masking egotism, lust, masochism, fantasy under a mythology of sentimental postures, a welter of self-induced miseries and joys, blinding and masking the essential personalities in the frozen gestures of courtship, in the kissing and the dating and the desire, the compliments and the quarrels which vivify its barrenness.”
Greer (1939 - present) was born in Australia and many people thoroughly wish she had stayed there. Although regarded as one of the foremost feminists of the late twentieth century her acerbic tongue has offended as many as she has delighted. In her later life she has become something of a TV talking head - and pops up on many shows that her younger self would no doubt have despised.
Oliver Goldsmith
“Friendship is a disinterested commerce between equals; love an abject intercourse between tyrants and slaves.”
Goldsmith (1730 - 1744) brought the world some fabulous plays and novels. The Vicar of Wakefield is one of his, as is She Stoops To Conquer. Lesser k known is the fact that he wrote the children's story Little Goody Two Shoes - so giving us one of the most irritating playground names ever. Thanks Oliver!
Lord Byron, from Don Juan
“Now hatred is by far the longest pleasure;
Men love in haste, but they detest at leisure.”
Mad, Bad and Dangerous to know! That's how Lady Caroline Lamb described Byron (1788 - 1824) and she was pretty much right. His most famous works are Childe Harold's Pilgrimage and Don Juan. He is still very popular as much, I suspect, for his reputation as his poetry. His daughter Ada Lovelace is widely acknowledged as the first programmer - she worked on the predecessor to what you are using now with Charles Babbage. So if it hadn't been for the mad, bad and dangerous Lord, you might not be reading this now!
Maurice Chevalier
“Many a man has fallen in love with a girl in a light so dim he would not have chosen a suit by it.”
Chevalier (1888 - 1972) actually wrote the song Valentine which is still popular today. With this straw hat and impeccable French manners he charmed audiences around the world. Essentially a man of contradictions, during the Second World War he gave concerts for German soldiers while at the same time having a Jewish girlfriend, Nita Ray.
In 1970 he record the themes for the Disney cartoon The Aristocats, for which he is still fondly remembered.
Marcel Proust, A la recherché du temps perdu
“There can be no peace of mind in love, since the advantage one has
secured is never anything but a fresh starting-point for further
desires.”
Referred to in a Monty Python sketch as an example of a sane person, Proust (1871 - 1922) is considered one of the best novelists ever, despite his short life. He is best remembered for Remembrance Of Things Past, the last part of which was published in 1927 when Proust himself fell very much in to that category.
Henry Fielding
“What is commonly called love, namely the desire of satisfying a
voracious appetite with a certain quantity of delicate white flesh.”
Fielding (1707 - 1774) was a satirist and novelist who lent a young Welsh singer of the twentieth century the name of his most famous novel as his stage name. So was born Tom Jones. As well as his fame as a writer, Fielding and his brother formed the first police force in London - The Bow Street Runners the story of which in 2008 was adapted for TV in the series City Of Vice.
Francois Rochefoucauld
“There are very few people who are not ashamed of having been in love when they no longer love each other”
Rochefoucauld (1613 - 1680) was unfortunate enough to be born a noble at a time when the French court changed back and forth from helping them to chopping off their heads on a regular basis. He is best known for his Memoirs, which offended so many of his friends on publication that he denied he had written it. Then he said he had. Then he denied it. As oscillatory as the times, in other words!
W Somerset Maugham
“Because women can do nothing except love, they've given it a ridiculous importance.”
Maugham (1874 - 1965), playwright, short story writer and novelist. At his height in the thirties he was the highest paid in his profession. His greatest work is Of Human Bondage. The novel was partly biographical. The main character's club foot was an echo of Maugham's own stutter, which plagued him all his life. Poor old W!
Sigmund Freud
“Dogs love their friends and bite their enemies, quite unlike people,
who are incapable of pure love and always have to mix love with hate.”
The Father of Psychoanalysis, Freud (1856 - 1939) could be seen as the originator of the global, but particularly American fixation with psychiatry. He was the first to express the idea that sexual desire is the primary motivator in human life. I think we probably could have told him that! He also valued dreams as an insight in to our unconscious desires. You love him or hate him. Freud is spoken of as the greatest charlatan of the medical world and the saviour of modern humanity in the same breath. Don't you just love contradictions?
