Theodore Zeldin

This book was variously seen as an answer to Orwell's pessimistic vision of the future, as a 'wickedly funny and very wise satire', as a burlesque of academic illusions, and as 'the maddest novel ever written'. It attracted particular attention from women commentators, who called it 'one of the most significant books of our time', 'pointing out paths hitherto unnoticed rather than giving lessons', 'as sparkling as champagne'; and who appreciated the sleeping souls: ‘People are too tired to be happy’. ‘Here is our new Pico de la Mirandola’, wrote one (exhuming the 15th century philosopher whose Oration on the Dignity of Man has been called ‘the Manifesto of the Renaissance’); this was ‘culture personified’, others liked ‘the charm of erudition combined with an overflowing imagination’, or the union of ‘knowledge and humour’. Zeldin explained his ‘free history’ as a rebellion against scholarship being condemned to use only classical forms of presentation, he was attempting to give history the freedom to do what abstract art had done to traditional representational art, to enlarge the range of discoveries it could make. He wanted to reveal more of ‘the human factor which, despite all efforts to regiment it, is an unfailing source of surprises’, and to change the way people looked at the past, by making them more aware of how much what they saw differed from what others saw.

Muse Conversations have taken place in twelve countries with participants from every social category, from the World Economic Forum at Davos, the Olympic Games, multinational corporations and public officials to universities, doctors’ patients and shelters for homeless people. Guide to an Unknown City (2004) contains the self-portraits of a wide variety of Oxford residents and Guide to an Unknown University (2006) those of professors, students, alumni, administrators and maintenance staff, revealing what they do not normally tell one another. A new series is devoted to The People of London in their own Words (2014).

The Oxford Muse Foundation was established in 2001 to pursue the practical implications of Zeldin's thinking. Its ambition 'to stimulate courage and invention in personal, professional and cultural life' is implemented in three ways. In personal life, it has responded to the superficiality of social intercourse by organising one-to-one conversations between people who do not know one another; and it helps individuals to create sophisticated self-portraits (in prose or in film) to say what they would like others to understand about them, replacing the boasts of curricula vitae with more deeply considered reflections on character, opinions and ambitions. In professional life, it investigates how different forms of work can be reconceived to fulfil the expanding aspirations of a new generation, and it designs small-scale experiments to test how particular industries can look beyond the traditional assumptions of business practice so as to diminish the frustrations and boredom of employment. In cultural life, its goal is to create a new level of postgraduate education that, instead of teaching how to become a narrow specialist, is an introduction to the ways of thinking of people in the many different branches of science, commerce, public service, spirituality and the arts, how they approach problems, how they view the world and what unresolved problems they face, in every civilisation.

Zeldin's search for an alternative vision of what work could be, beyond replacing human labour with machines, and beyond shortening working hours so as to leave time for leisure and entertainment, began in the 1990s in a research project for the European Commission. His starting point was that since most existing jobs and professions were invented long ago, their purpose was to fulfil hopes which were different from those of the present generation, for whom survival, status and skill are insufficient rewards. He sees a billion young people, over the next few decades, searching not just for jobs, but for more interesting and exciting jobs, and being increasingly demanding as they become more educated and their curiosities range more widely. Because agriculture, industry and the service sectors are governed by the doctrine that reducing staff is the key to efficiency, and because work is no longer an integral part of family, community or spiritual life, as it once was, the young are being challenged to invent new occupations, providing more satisfactions than existing forms.

After writing a 17,000 word chapter on ‘Eating and Drinking’ in the History of French Passions, Zeldin persuaded his colleagues at St Antony's College Oxford (who acquiesced with sceptical smiles) to appoint a research fellow in the history of gastronomy. The person chosen was a former ambassador, Alan Davidson, who had given up diplomacy to study food, on which he had published remarkable books. Zeldin was determined that gastronomy was as worthy of study in universities as any other of the pleasures of life. Together they founded the Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery in 1981, which has met annually ever since, bringing together about 200 experts, professional and amateur, from all over the world. A different theme is discussed each year, to the accompaniment of remarkable meals from different countries, and with the proceedings amusingly spiced by the contrasting personalities of Zeldin and Davidson as joint chairmen. In the first thirty years, thirty volumes were published containing the essays contributed by participants. Zeldin took his interest in experimental innovation further by starting a restaurant inside his college, run by a cordon bleu chef, to compete against the college's own more conventional food, and to attract fresh ideas from diners from outside the college. He emphasises that the taste of food is only one part of gastronomy, quoting Brillat-Savarin who exalted not only the art of the kitchen but also the art of the table and the conversation and conviviality it encouraged.

Zeldin has been elected a Fellow of the British Academy and of the Royal Society of Literature, and a member of the European Academy. He has been decorated as a Commander of the Order of the British Empire, a Commander of the Légion d'Honneur and a Commander of the Order of Arts and Letters of France, and with Britain's top award for History, the Wolfson Prize. He has been married to Deirdre Wilson, the co-inventor of Relevance Theory, since 1975; they live in an Art Deco house outside Oxford. He gives his recreations as 'gardening, painting and mending things'.

Theodore Zeldin CBE (born 22 August 1933) is an Oxford scholar and thinker whose books have searched for answers to three questions. Where can a person look to find more inspiring ways of spending each day and each year? What ambitions remain unexplored, beyond happiness, prosperity, faith, love, technology or therapy? What role could there be for individuals with independent minds, or who feel isolated or different, or misfits? Each of Zeldin's books illuminates from a different angle of what people can do today, that they could not in previous centuries.

Theodore Zeldin was born on the slopes of Mount Carmel on 22 August 1933, the son of Russian-Jewish parents who later chose to become naturalised British subjects. His father was a civil engineer, an expert in bridge-building, a colonel in the Russian Czarist Army and a socialist who rejected the Bolsheviks; his mother, the daughter of an industrialist, was a dentist who completed her training in Vienna. Escaping from the Russian Civil War, they emigrated to Palestine, where he worked for the British Colonial Service building railways, but was disappointed by the failure of the movement for Arab-Jewish solidarity which, together with other scientists and intellectuals, he favoured, and of which the railwaymen's trade union was a vocal advocate. Theodore Zeldin was educated at the English School Heliopolis (a mixed-sex boarding school) and at Aylesbury Grammar School. He graduated from London University (Birkbeck College) at the age of 17 in philosophy, history and Latin and then from Oxford University (Christ Church) in modern history, with Firsts from both, followed by a doctorate at the newly established St Antony's College, Oxford. He has been a fellow of St Antony's since 1957 (now Emeritus); he was its dean for thirteen years and played a leading role in developing it as the university's centre for international studies. Now as an Associate Fellow of Green-Templeton College Oxford, he is active in its Future of Work project.

Zeldin's thinking has been fed and encouraged by invitations to advise decision-makers in finance, law, medicine, IT, consulting, transport, manufacturing, insurance, design, arts, advertising, retailing, energy, human resources, government, and international organisations, and by being appointed a professor honoris causa of HEC, the Paris Business School, and an associate fellow of Oxford University's Said Business School's executive education programme as well as of Green Templeton College, Oxford, whose remit is human welfare in the broadest sense. He has been helped in understanding where the obstacles to innovation are most formidable as a guest of the World Economic Forum, the Australian Future Summit, the Creative Leadership Summit, Mrs Sonia Gandhi's Conference in New Delhi, as an advisor to the Greek Cultural Olympics, a vice-president of Culture Action Europe, a member of the EU commission which established the European Voluntary Service, a participant in the work of the Council of Europe, a member of the BBC Brains Trust and the management committee of the Society of Authors, an Associate of the Demos Think Tank, a Patron of the National Academy of Writing, a Trustee of the Wytham Hall Medical Charity for the Homeless and the Amar International Appeal for Refugees, and a visiting professor at Harvard and the University of Southern California Management Today cited him in its New Guru Guide for the 21st century as ‘one of Britain’s leading intellects’.