A. C. Grayling

Anthony Clifford Grayling was born in 1949 at Luanshya, in what was then Northern Rhodesia and is now Zambia, where his father managed a bank branch. He studied at Sussex and took his doctorate at Magdalen College, Oxford under P. F. Strawson and A. J. Ayer, working on scepticism about knowledge. He joined Birkbeck, University of London in 1991 and held a chair there from 2005; in 2011 he founded the New College of the Humanities in London and became its Master. Weidenfeld and Nicolson issued The Meaning of Things: Applying Philosophy to Life in 2001, gathering the short essays he had been writing for The Last Word, his column in The Guardian, on courage, betrayal, ambition, love, cruelty and death. American editions carry the title Meditations for the Humanist. Grayling argues openly for secular humanism and was appointed CBE in 2017.