Features
The Wider Circle: London's Eccentric Scene
Beyond our own club, the flame of eccentricity burns bright across the capital and the Home Counties. So here is our field guide to eccentric London:…
Author
The Editor
Features
How Eccentric is Downing Street?
Long before Downing Street acquired its latest occupant, Britain had entrusted its fortunes to an extraordinary procession of tree-fellers, tricyclists, theologians, dandies, yachtsmen and philosophers. From…
Editor at the Roost
Lives and Portraits of Remarkable Characters
A short history of The Eccentric - its editors, its publishers, and why, after more than fifty years and three series, it now goes online
Obituaries
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, rode a unicycle past him —…
Obituaries
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 that he was not one himself.…
Obituaries
Christopher Lee (1941–2021)
He was expelled from grammar school over a cricket pavilion that came very close to burning down, and ran away to sea on a tramp steamer.…
Obituaries
Gary Bowman (1952-2020)
He took bets on American football from a call centre in Manchester, moved the whole operation to an island in the Indian Ocean to keep it…
History
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 room, and a hundred feet of…
History
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 a god and handed a crown,…
History
The Dancing Marquess
He had 30,000 acres, a perfumed motor car and a chapel he turned into a theatre. In six brief years, Henry Cyril Paget spent the lot…
Obituaries
Martin Miller (1946–2013)
He wrote a dating manual at fourteen, before he met his first girlfriend. And sold a hundred copies in a week. He lost twenty million and…
Travel
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 - and it grows pineapples in…
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?
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 drawn by others are necessarily the…