Get ready to meet Robin Farquharson, the enigmatic British theorist whose life was as explosive as it was brilliant. A new biography by M Syd Rosen brings to light the chaotic, often hilarious tale of this 'luminous ruin of a man', a poet once called him – and he lived up to the billing in spades.
Farquharson's CV reads like a who's who of intellectual heavyweights. Born into the privileged South African elite, he was already flying high by 16, with a pilot's licence under his belt and Oxford on the horizon. He rubbed shoulders with future Chancellor Nigel Lawson at PPE, but it wasn't just politics that got his engines roaring – his work on maths and voting systems earned him plaudits from the likes of John Searle and Amartya Sen.
By the 1960s, Farquharson had traded academia for activism in apartheid-ridden South Africa. He became a high-profile Liberal party figure, campaigning against segregation and societal norms as an openly gay man – no easy feat back then. His exploits landed him on the wrong side of the cops, who repeatedly tried to strip him of his passport.
Rosen's meticulous biography paints a picture of Farquharson's 1960s and '70s heyday: rubbing shoulders with Nobel laureates, consorting with occultists and dianetics promoters, founding countercultural groups – the man was everywhere. He even made a pro-Palestinian film that would make your head spin!
But what lies behind Farquharson's trailblazing, avant-garde persona? Was he an intellectual itinerant, like Timothy Leary, or a class defector trying to outrun his privileged roots? Rosen's book offers no easy answers – and that's exactly why you need to read it.