Thinker, Failure, Soldier, Jailer: An Anthology of Great Lives in 365 Days - The Telegraph (Telegraph Books) - Softcover

'Rich, varied and endlessly entertaining.'

'Life-affirming. Best given to someone who appreciates that.'

'We're all equal when it's our turn to meet the grim reaper... An eclectic, day-by-day anthology of the Daily Telegraph's obituary columns, taking in the obscene but worthy, as well as the  famous and notorious.'

‘I did what I always do in times of trouble – consult not the Good Book, but a good book. This was Thinker, Failure, Soldier, Jailer, a collection of obituaries from the Daily Telegraph, the paper that first started printing warts and all descriptions of the dead.’

'Watching this cavalcade go by, at a very decent pace, is often instructive, sometimes inspiring and always enormous fun. Few people will read more than three pages without laughing out loud or pausing to share the joke with anyone within shouting distance.'

'One of the best books published this year.'

‘I did what I always do in times of trouble – consult not the Good Book, but a good book. This was Thinker, Failure, Soldier, Jailer, a collection of obituaries from the Daily Telegraph, the paper that first started printing warts and all descriptions of the dead.’

Simon Hoggart, Guardian

The Telegraph’s obituaries pages are renowned for their quality of writing and capacity to distil the essence of a life from its most extraordinary moments. A unique mix of heroism, ingenuity, infamy and the bizarre, Thinker, Failure, Soldier, Jailer collects the very best of those obituaries to present an endlessly absorbing compendium of human endeavour.  

Organised day by day around the calendar year, with each life presented on the date it ended, the book features hundreds of remarkable stories. World statesmen jostle with glamorous celluloid stars, pioneering boffins sit alongside chart-topping rock ’n’ rollers, while artists and their muses mingle with record-breaking sportsmen, Victoria Cross winners, spies, showgirls and captains of industry – as well as the titans of rather more esoteric fields.

Here, for instance, can be found Britain’s greatest goat breeder, a hangman who campaigned to abolish the death penalty, a priest to Soho’s pimps, a cross-dressing mountaineer and a minister who preached a gospel of avarice - donations in notes only, please, as ‘change makes me nervous’.
 
A treasure trove of human virtue, vice and trivia, Thinker, Failure, Soldier, Jailer is the perfect gift for the armchair psychologist in all of us.