Selections

Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679) liked to say that he was born prematurely when his mother heard that the Spanish Armada was coming, so that 'fear and I were born twins'. He spent much of his life as tutor and secretary to the aristocratic Cavendish family, met Galileo in Italy and was fascinated by geometry.

During the English Civil War he lived in exile in Paris, where he taught mathematics to the future King Charles II and wrote Leviathan (1651), arguing that only a powerful sovereign can save people from a war of all against all. He lived to ninety-one and was translating Homer in his eighties.