Eccentrics

Cecil Rhodes was an English-born businessman, mining magnate, and politician in South Africa. He was the founder of the diamond company De Beers, which today markets 40% of the world's rough diamonds and at one time marketed 90%. An ardent believer in colonialism and imperialism, he was the founder of the state of Rhodesia, which was named after him. After independence, Rhodesia separated into the nations of Northern and Southern Rhodesia, later renamed Zambia and Zimbabwe, respectively. South Africa's Rhodes University is named after him. He set up the provisions of the Rhodes Scholarship, which is funded by his estate.

André Malraux was a French author, adventurer and statesman.

Samuel Steward was a university professor, writer, tattoo artist, and pornographer.

Harold L. Humes was the originator of The Paris Review literary magazine, author of two novels in the late 1950s, and a gregarious fixture of the cultural scene in Paris, London, and New York in the 1950s and early 1960s. He was a champion talker, activist, filmmaker, architect, and contemporary Don Quixote. In 1966, in London, he took large amounts of LSD, which was given to him by Timothy Leary, and he became paranoid and sometimes delusional. After this, he no longer published any writing. When he returned to the US in 1969, he reinvented himself as a "guru on campus", a self-appointed visiting professor, and spent the next 20-odd years living on or near-campus at Columbia, Princeton, Bennington, and Harvard, dependent on both his family, and on students who were fascinated by his mixture of erudition and mental illness.