Karl Martin

“Your favourite virtue ... SimplicityYour favourite virtue in man ... StrengthYour favourite virtue in woman ... WeaknessYour chief characteristic ... Singleness of purposeYour idea of happiness ... To fightYour idea of misery ... SubmissionThe vice you excuse most ... GullibilityThe vice you detest most ... ServilityYour aversion ... Martin TupperFavourite occupation ... Book-wormingFavourite poet ... Shakespeare, Aeschylus, GoetheFavourite prose-writer ... DiderotFavourite hero ... Spartacus, KeplerFavourite heroine ... Gretchen [Heroine of Goethe's Faust]Favourite flower ... DaphneFavourite colour ... RedFavourite name ... Laura, JennyFavourite dish ... FishFavourite maxim ... Nihil humani a me alienum puto [Nothing human is alien to me]Favourite motto ... De omnibus dubitandum [Everything must be doubted].””

“[Martin] Luther, we grant, overcame bondage out of devotion by replacing it by bondage out of conviction. He shattered faith in authority because he restored the authority of faith. He turned priests into laymen because he turned laymen into priests. He freed man from outer religiosity because he made religiosity the inner man. He freed the body from chains because he enchained the heart.””

“Through Jimi Hendrix's music you can almost see the assassinations of President John F. Kennedy and of Martin Luther King Junior, the beginnings of the Berlin Wall, Yuri Gagarin in space, Fidel Castro and Cuba, the debut of Spiderman, Martin Luther King Junior’s ‘I Have a Dream’ speech, Ford Mustang cars, anti-Vietnam protests, Mary Quant designing the mini-skirt, Indira Gandhi becoming the Prime Minister of India, four black students sitting down at a whites-only lunch counter in Greensboro North Carolina, President Johnson pushing the Civil Rights Act, flower children growing their hair long and practicing free love, USA-funded IRA blowing up innocent civilians on the streets and in the pubs of Great Britain, Napalm bombs being dropped on the lush and carpeted fields of Vietnam, a youth-driven cultural revolution in Swinging London, police using tear gas and billy-clubs to break up protests in Chicago, Mods and Rockers battling on Brighton Beach, Native Americans given the right to vote in their own country, the United Kingdom abolishing the death penalty, and the charismatic Argentinean Marxist revolutionary Che Guevara. It’s all in Jimi’s absurd and delirious guitar riffs.””