Eccentrics

Zambian Afronauts

In the 1960s, teacher and independence activist Edward Makuka Nkoloso founded Zambia’s unofficial National Academy of Science, Space Research and Philosophy. He intended to beat the United States and Soviet Union to the Moon, then send teenager Matha Mwamba, two cats and a missionary to Mars. Outside Lusaka, his “Afronauts” trained with oil drums and rope swings intended to simulate weightlessness. The programme had no government support, its proposed funding never arrived and its homemade rocket remained on Earth. Whether Nkoloso was entirely sincere, satirising the space race and colonial attitudes, or doing both at once remains unresolved.

John C. Lilly

John C. Lilly was an American physician and neuroscientist who developed the first modern isolation tank in 1954 to study a mind deprived of external stimulation. He later established a partially flooded laboratory in the Virgin Islands, where NASA-supported researchers attempted to teach dolphins spoken English. Lilly believed communication with another species might prepare humanity for contact with extraterrestrial intelligence. His later investigations became increasingly cosmic, including reported contact with an organization he called the Earth Coincidence Control Office. The isolation tank survived as a wellness device. The dolphin-English programme did not.

Sheikh Hamad bin Hamdan Al Nahyan

Sheikh Hamad bin Hamdan Al Nahyan is an Emirati royal and car collector better known as the Rainbow Sheikh, after ordering seven Mercedes in the colours of the rainbow. His collection contains hundreds of vehicles, including a giant Willys Jeep, a three-times-scale Hummer H1, a ten-wheeled SUV and an enormous Dodge Power Wagon with living quarters inside. Many are fully functional. For Sheikh Hamad, the boundary between an automobile and a building appears to be an unnecessary technicality.

The Cheese and the Worms

The Cheese and the Worms is a 1976 book by Carlo Ginzburg about a sixteenth-century Italian miller who believed the universe began as cheese and angels emerged from it like worms. His ideas survive because the Inquisition wrote them down.

Angus Barbieri

Angus Barbieri was a Scottish man who fasted for 382 days, from 14 June 1965 to 30 June 1966. He subsisted on tea, coffee, sparkling water, vitamins and yeast extract while living at home in Tayport, Scotland, frequently visiting Maryfield Hospital for medical evaluation.

Breatharianism

Breatharianism: Breathe and Live Forever is a 1982 book by Wiley Brooks and Nancy Foss promoting the discredited belief that humans can survive on air alone. Brooks was later exposed for making late-night trips to 7-Eleven.

Thomas Phillipps

Thomas Phillipps was an English antiquary and book collector who amassed the largest collection of manuscript material in the 19th century. He was an illegitimate son of a textile manufacturer and inherited a substantial estate, which he spent almost entirely on vellum manuscripts and, when out of funds, borrowed heavily to buy manuscripts, thereby putting his family deep into debt. Phillipps recorded in an early catalogue that his collection was instigated by reading various accounts of the destruction of valuable manuscripts. Such was his devotion that he acquired some 40,000 printed books and 60,000 manuscripts, arguably the largest collection a single individual has created, and coined the term "vello-maniac" to describe his obsession, which is more commonly termed bibliomania.

Fyodor Konyukhov

Fyodor Konyukhov is a Russian adventurer, artist, and author renowned for his extraordinary feats of exploration. A modern-day polymath, Konyukhov has completed over 50 expeditions, including solo crossings of oceans, polar treks, and a record-breaking solo balloon flight around the globe. Eccentric and deeply spiritual, Konyukhov blends adventure with artistic and religious expression. An ordained priest, he often incorporates religious rituals into his journeys, viewing exploration as a form of pilgrimage. His meticulous journals and vivid paintings, many created during his expeditions, reflect his philosophical musings and reverence for nature.

Philippe Jullian

Philippe Jullian was a French writer, illustrator, and art historian known for his wit, eccentricity, and deep engagement with the aesthetics of the Belle Époque and fin-de-siècle periods. Born in Bordeaux into an aristocratic family, Jullian developed an early fascination with decadence and symbolism, which became central themes in his work. He gained prominence through his biographies of cultural figures like Oscar Wilde, Edward VII, and Sarah Bernhardt, offering incisive and often humorous portraits of their lives and times.

Henry Paget, 5th Marquess of Anglesey

Henry Paget, 5th Marquess of Anglesey, styled Lord Paget until 1880 and Earl of Uxbridge between 1880 and 1898, and nicknamed "Toppy", was a British peer who was notable during his short life for squandering his inheritance on a lavish social life and accumulating massive debts. Regarded as the "black sheep" of the family, he was dubbed "the dancing marquess" and for his Butterfly Dancing, taken from Loie Fuller, where a voluminous robe of transparent white silk would be waved like wings. Vicary Gibbs, writing in The Complete Peerage in 1910, commented that he "seems only to have existed for the purpose of giving a melancholy and unneeded illustration of the truth that a man with the finest prospects, may, by the wildest folly and extravagance, as Sir Thomas Browne says, 'foully miscarry in the advantage of humanity, play away an uniterable life, and have lived in vain.'"

Opus

Encyclopædia of the sublime