John Stuart Mill, in his essay On Liberty, considered eccentricity in a nation's character to be "proportional to the amount of genius, mental vigor and moral courage it contained." Britain has always esteemed such doughty dotties as the 19th century Roman Catholic naturalist, Charles Waterton, who devoted his life to exterminating black rats in England on the ground that they were foreigners smuggled into the country by Hanoverian Protestants. The 1951 Festival of Britain even set aside a section of one pavilion to commemorate oddballs. Britain's contemporary eccentrics manifest more energy than originality, but Britons in the past month have found...
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