John Addington Symonds

Born in Bristol in 1840 and educated at Harrow and Balliol College, Oxford, he became an English poet, essayist, literary critic, and biographer with a wide range of interests. He is best known for The Renaissance in Italy, a major multi-volume history that helped shape Victorian ideas about Renaissance culture.

Alongside literary criticism and biography, he wrote on Greek culture, Michelangelo, Shakespeare, and many other subjects. Modern readers also return to him for writings that explored desire between men with unusual seriousness and sympathy, making him an important early voice in the history of gay thought in Britain.

He spent much of his later life in Switzerland for health reasons and died in Rome in 1893. His work combines scholarship, personal feeling, and a strong sense that art and history should be lived as well as studied.