Ben Thomson profile picture

Ben Thomson

He's not a Nazi, he's just old fashioned

About Me

Winner of the 2005 Nicholas Soames medal for “Distinguished Service in the Face of Extreme Yoghurt-Weaving”, I have the manners of a clergyman, the appetites of a jackal and the tailoring of your granddad. A stoic advocate of Enlightenment ideals, I strive in order to gain some modest facility in such gentleman’s pursuits as music, literature, philosophy and the languages and culture of the classical world.My raison d’etre? To walk life’s sunny boulevard clothed in the linen suit of virtue and the Panama of good taste, whilst crushing the rapacious and degenerate cockroaches that are relativism, rudeness and cultural infantilisation under reason's immaculate brogues.

My Interests

The resurrection of the Grand Narrative.

I'd like to meet:

Christopher Hitchens

Music:

Bach, Celestial Bach. Otherwise: Tallis, Byrd, Morley, Monteverdi, Purcell, Couperin, Vivaldi, Rameau, Scarlatti, Handel, Mozart, Haydn, Beethoven, Berlioz, Wagner, Bruckner, Faure, Debussy, Satie, Stravinsky, Schoenberg, Messiaen, Arvo Part, John Tavener, Gavin Bryars, Louis Armstrong, Bessie Smith, Sidney Bechet, Lester Young, Billie Holiday, Coleman Hawkins, Duke Ellington, Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, Thelonious Monk, Jackie McLean, John Coltrane, Stan Getz, Oscar Peterson, Paul Desmond, Sonny Rollins, Cannonball Adderley, Art Blakey, Archie Shepp, WSQ, Sun Ra, John McLaughlin, Keith Jarrett, Chick Corea, Eric Dolphy, Herbie Hancock, Wayne Shorter, Jan Garbarek, Michael Brecker, Gato Barbieri, The Temptations, Junior Walker, Parliament-Funkadelic, The Meters, James Brown, War, Sly Stone, Donald Byrd, Nick Cave, Tom Waits, Leonard Cohen, Jacques Brel, Noel Coward, The Beatles, Talking Heads, Ivor Cutler, The Clash

Books:

Faves current and perennial: The Bible. Homer, Hesiod, Theocritus, Callimachus, Demosthenes, Aeschylus, Euripides, Heraclitus, Plato, Aristotle, Xenophon, Sallust, Virgil, Ovid, Cicero, Martial, Juvenal, Catullus, Lucretius, Tacitus, Suetonius, Lucian, Boethius, Avicenna, St Anselm, Pierre Abelard, St Thomas Aquinas, Vico, Kant, Nietzsche, Cassirer, Hume, Locke, Rousseau, Spinoza, J S Mill, Russell, Wittgenstein, Leo Strauss, Blake, Tennyson, Donne, Shakespeare, Borges, Kafka, Joyce, Mallarme, Milton, Dante, Boccaccio, Pope, Swift, Bunyan, Nabokov, Beckett, Huxley, Orwell, Lewis Carroll, Edward Lear, J G Frazer, Arthur Machen, H P Lovecraft, Philip Larkin, Thomas Pynchon, Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, Umberto Eco, Alan Moore, Martin Amis.

Heroes:

Bach, Newton, Shakespeare, Aristotle, Virgil, Kant