International Freak by M Syd Rosen review – the British Timothy Leary

Robin Farquharson was a prize-winning game theorist, anti-apartheid activist and countercultural chaos merchant

Even as an undergraduate, Robin Farquharson was famous for being erratic. He provoked anxiety and goodwill in equal measure. His aim in life, according to an anonymous writer in an Oxford student newspaper, was “to become a contradiction in terms. Since last October, he has been cutting friends in the street; sleeping alternate nights in mysterious George Street garrets and obscure collegiate crypts.” The profile described his soul as “dogged, indomitable” and “fierce, incompatible”. Maybe. Later to become a prize-winning game theorist often hailed as a genius, he died aged just 42 in a squat fire on April Fools’ Day 1973. The poet Aidan Andrew Dun called him an “outsider among outsiders … a luminous ruin of a man”. For anti-psychiatrist RD Laing, he was “very intelligent and totally out of his fucking mind”.

Farquharson once joked he had been born a member of the master race in South Africa. He wasn’t entirely wrong. His father had founded a distinguished law firm in Pretoria; high-up politicians would regularly come over for dinner. He attended elite private schools – future pupils included the novelist Wilbur Smith and Elon Musk – and got himself a pilot’s licence even before, barely 16, he entered university. Later at Oxford he studied PPE, befriended Bertrand Russell and Rupert Murdoch (a self-declared Marxist at the time), and shared digs with future chancellor of the exchequer Nigel Lawson. Intellectually he was regarded as high-wattage but, about to land a starry All Souls College fellowship, he wrecked his chances by phoning the college warden to tell him he had a message from God he needed to share.
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