International Freak by M Syd Rosen review – the British Timothy Leary
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- Robin Farquharson was a prize-winning game theorist who died aged 42 in a squat fire on April Fools' Day 1973, according to M Syd Rosen's new biography 'International Freak' — the first book about him
- Farquharson won plaudits from philosophers John Searle, Michael Dummett and Amartya Sen, a major prize from the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and appeared on BBC election night coverage in 1955
- Farquharson wrecked his chances of an All Souls College fellowship by phoning the warden to deliver 'a message from God' he needed to share
- In South Africa, Farquharson was a leading light in the Liberal party, conspired with poet-activist Dennis Brutus in his campaign to get South Africa banned from international sporting events, and found publishing perches for novelist Bessie Head
- At Oxford Farquharson studied PPE, befriended Bertrand Russell and a self-declared Marxist Rupert Murdoch, shared digs with future chancellor Nigel Lawson, and attended elite Pretoria private schools where future pupils included Wilbur Smith and Elon Musk
- Farquharson's 1968 memoir 'Drop Out!' recounts being attacked by a gang of teenagers who called him 'a Negro' and 'a Jew'; anti-psychiatrist RD Laing called him 'very intelligent and totally out of his fucking mind'
- A Cambridge college that holds material about Farquharson refuses to release it because it is 'too distressing', forcing Rosen to reconstruct his life from fragmentary sources
Why it matters: Rosen's biography is the first sustained attempt to reconstruct Farquharson's life, partly because a Cambridge college still seals his papers as 'too distressing' — making this a rare window into a 'crazed scholar' whose serious game-theory and voting-systems work earned him Amartya Sen's praise and a 1955 BBC election-night role, but whose brilliance was eventually 'devoured by the roiling energies of his age'.
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