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Literature & Arts

The mermaid in a dog collar

From a vicar who dressed as a mermaid, preached with nine cats in church and created what became the modern…

Out of the Centre: Exploring the Meaning of the Word 'Eccentric'

On the drifting meaning of a single word - why the late Lord Bath spent a lifetime declining it, how…

Christopher Lee (1941–2021)

He was expelled from grammar school over a cricket pavilion that came very close to burning down, and ran away…

Nic Wing (1958-2016)

At twenty-one, he stood about in the grounds of Knebworth House while Trevor Howard, blacked up and in a tutu,…

Barry Martin (1943-2025)

He spent sixty years making art out of movement — steel rods that crept in and out of their own…

The Del Boy of the Forties

He played every wide boy, tipster, black-marketeer and fast-talking chancer that the British cinema of the rationed years required —…

Literature & Arts

Reflections Before Lunch

Set within the quiet rooms of an ancestral Irish country house, this contemplative piece explores memory, landscape, inheritance and identity.

The Peer Who Turned Down a Kingdom

Kipling wrote The Man Who Would Be King - the fable of an Englishman who travels east, is taken for…

The Great Point of the Tower

Pink pigeons on the lawn, a clavichord under the seat of the Rolls, a horse taking tea in the drawing…

Editor at the Roost

Contradiction in Terms

"Eccentric Club?" – "Isn't there a contradiction in terms?"

Editor at the Roost

Are You Eccentric?

What if eccentricity is not the exception, but the natural condition of being human?

Martin Miller (1946–2013)

He wrote a dating manual at fourteen, before he met his first girlfriend. And sold a hundred copies in a…

The Garden That Went to Sleep

Cornwall's Heligan is not merely eccentric. It is the strangest, saddest, most gloriously peculiar estate in that part of Britain…

Benedict "Ben" le Vay (1953-2022)

He judged the Club's Greatest British Eccentric of the Year award in 2009, and went on insisting to the end…

Editor at the Roost

Definitions of Eccentricity

The eccentric does not behave strangely for the sake of it; the eccentric simply refuses to accept that the boundaries…