Links to the files of
which follow the remarks below:–
Comprising
thirty-three biographical sketches of some of the twentieth-century's most
influential and powerful people in both politics and the arts, including
Hitler, Lenin, Stalin, de Valera, Mussolini, de Gaulle, Ben-Gurian, André
Malraux, Bertrand Russell, Salvador Dali, Simone de Beauvoir, Jean-Paul Sartre,
and Aldous Huxley, Portraits (1985) seeks to provoke as well as to praise, and should prove
of interest to those who are curious to learn how various exceptional men – and
one exceptional woman – measure up to a Social Transcendentalist analysis or,
more correctly, to the scrutiny of someone who approaches life from a specific
ideological standpoint with a view to measuring the achievements of others in
relation to it.Although I had dealt
with some of the subjects, including Jean-Paul Sartre and Aldous Huxley, before
(see Becoming and Being), my treatment of them here is much more
subjectively critical and thus a reflection, in large measure, of the way my
thinking had progressed during the intervening three years since the earlier
excursion into biography, which, characteristic of a more relativistic approach
to literature typifying me at that time, also embraced a series of
autobiographical sketches.No such
relativity applies here, however, although the choice of both politicians and
artists is anything but absolutist, as suggested by the subtitle. – John O’Loughlin.
John O’Loughlin was born in Salthill, Galway, the Republic
of Ireland,
of mixed Irish- and British-born parents in 1952. Following a parental split partly due to his mother's Aldershot origins (her father, a Presbyterian from Donegal, had served in the British Army),
he was brought to England by his mother and grandmother (who upon the death of her husband had initially returned to Ireland after a lengthy marital absence from Athenry) in the mid-50s and, having had the benefit of private tuition from a Catholic priest, subsequently attended St. Joseph's and St. George's RC schools in Aldershot, Hants, and, with an enforced change of
denomination from Catholic to Protestant in consequence of having been sent to a children's home
by his mother upon the death and repatriation of his ethnically-protective grandmother, he went on to attend first Barrow Hedges Primary School in Carshalton Beeches, Surrey, and then Carshalton High School for Boys. Upon leaving the latter in pre-GCSE era 1970 with an
assortment of CSE’s
(Certificate of Secondary Education) and GCE’s
(General Certificate of Education), including history and music, he moved to London proper and went on, via two short-lived
jobs, to work at the Associated Board of the Royal Schools of Music in Bedford
Square, where, with some prior experience himself of having sat and passed (with merit) a grade 4 piano exam, he eventually became responsible for booking examination venues.
After a brief flirtation with further education at Redhill Technical College back in Surrey, where he had enrolled to do English and History A Levels, he returned to his former job in the West End
but, due to a combination of personal factors, handed in his notice at the ABRSM in 1976 and began to pursue a literary vocation which,
despite a brief spell as a computer tutor at Hornsey Management Agency within the local YMCA in the late '80s and
early '90s, he has steadfastly continued with ever since. His novels include Changing Worlds (1976), An Interview
Reviewed (1979), Secret
Exchanges (1980), Sublimated
Relations(1981), and False Pretences (1982). Since the mid-80s John O'Loughlin has dedicated himself almost exclusively to
philosophy, which he regards as his true literary vocation, and has penned numerous titles of a
philosophical nature, including Devil and
God (1985–6), Towards
the Supernoumenon(1987), Elemental Spectra (1988–9), Philosophical Truth (1991–2) and,
more recently, The Best
of All Possible Worlds (2008), The Centre of Truth
(2009), Insane but not Mad (2011) and Philosophic Flights of Poetic Fancy (2012).
