THWARTED AMBITIONS

John O'Loughlin was born in Salthill, Galway, the Republic of Ireland, of 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 premature 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 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 CSEs (Certificate of Secondary Education) and GCEs (General Certificate of Education), including history and music, he moved to London 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) an ABRSM Gd.4 piano exam, he eventually became responsible for booking examination venues. After a brief flirtation with 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, left the Associated Board in 1976 and began to pursue a literary vocation which, despite a brief spell as a computer tutor at Hornsey 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), Logan's Influence (1980), Sublimated Relations (1981), and Deceptive Motives (1981). Since the mid-80s Mr O'Loughlin has dedicated himself almost exclusively to philosophy, which he regards as his true literary vocation, and has penned more than seventy 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).

John O'Loughlin

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