A working library of admirations -
the company I keep when I'm thinking.

Executive creative director at Saatchi & Saatchi and the man behind the British Airways and Silk Cut campaigns, whose It's Not How Good You Are, It's How Good You Want to Be reads as a manifesto for ambition. For a spell he was a client of mine — the brief always came back sharper than it went out.

An American photographer and commercial director who became a major force in London, known for complex, highly polished studio work. He used to come up to Bournemouth Art College, and I always looked out for his covers on Management Today and his pages in British Vogue.

A master of witty, conceptual typography. As a co-founder of the agency that became Pentagram, he bridged the gap between modernism and humour - still the benchmark for designers who believe an idea should be as sharp as its execution.

The perfectionist eye behind the Habitat and Conran catalogues. I loved his sense of style — he knew exactly how to place every object in a room set so the whole page looked perfect.

The leading theorist on wabi-sabi. His writing bridges traditional Japanese aesthetics and modern design, teaching the beauty of imperfection, transience, and the unrefined.

One of the great Arts and Crafts designers - the "complete designer" of houses, wallpapers, textiles and furniture - who set down his philosophy in this 1915 book: that honest, lasting work springs from individual character and conscience, not from copying fashion or joining a movement. I'm no great reader and found it dry and a little over-thought, but its case for individuality is a very good one, and it has stayed with me.

A statesman and philosopher, vital for his inquiries into aesthetics - his theory of the Sublime - and his foundational influence on political and historical thought.

The "philosopher of pessimism", who held that the world is driven by a blind, insatiable will. His focus on aesthetics, the inner life, and the nature of human suffering makes him essential for anyone after intellectual independence.

A vast, digressive compendium from 1621 that sets out to dissect melancholy and ends up taking in the whole of human folly. Endlessly quotable, gloriously off-topic, and far better company than a book about sadness has any right to be.

A seminal work bridging biology and psychology. Gregory's account of perception explains how the brain constructs reality - essential for understanding how we see at all.

A renegade psychoanalyst, once one of Freud's circle, who held that emotional repression lodges itself physically in the body as muscular "armour", and tied the pull of authoritarian politics to sexual repression. Brilliant and unclassifiable, and later hounded for the wilder reaches of his work — but unforgettable on the body and freedom.

A profound examination of the duality of human existence: the contemplative mind against the passionate, sensory spirit. It remains an essential meditation on what it means to be an artist.

A titan of metaphysical poetry, working the tension between the physical and the spiritual, death and desire, with a complexity of thought that still challenges the modern reader.

A brilliant biochemist and historian who gave his life to the history of Chinese science and technology - a monument to intellectual scope and cross-cultural understanding.

Head of American wartime science, and the author of As We May Think - published in the Atlantic in July 1945, while the war was still running. In it he described the memex: a desk that would hold a whole library on microfilm and, more to the point, let you tie any two pages together into an associative trail that could be followed again years later, or handed to someone else. He had understood that the difficulty was never storing knowledge but finding the way back into it. Douglas Engelbart read the essay while stationed in the Philippines and spent his working life building what it described; Ted Nelson later gave the idea its name, hypertext. Every link on this page is Bush's thought, fifty years early and worked out on paper.

What he would make of the machines we have now is worth a guess. He drew his own line between repetitive thought, which he was content to hand to a machine, and creative thought, which he did not expect a machine to reach - and the memex was meant to enlarge a mind rather than stand in for one. That distinction outlived him: Engelbart called his life's work augmenting human intellect, pointedly not artificial intelligence. My guess is that Bush would have taken to the new machinery quickly and then asked the awkward question, because his trails were the opposite of an oracle - they could be inspected, re-followed, handed to a friend and argued with, and an answer arriving with no path behind it is the one thing his whole design was built to prevent.

Creator of WAIS, the pre-web Wide Area Information Servers, and founder of the Internet Archive - set on rebuilding the Library of Alexandria for everyone, with universal access to all knowledge, freely shared. With his help we developed our educational garden systems, and more than a decade ago now I was lucky enough to join his Thursday-night thinktank dinners a handful of times - kindnesses I remain grateful for.

A legendary editor who set the standard for investigative journalism and editorial integrity, famously transforming the Sunday Times. Why aren't there people like him now? I'm sure there are — they just have to shout that much louder to be heard. I worked with his wife, Tina Brown.

A writer, traveller and political officer, arguably one of the most influential women in the Middle East of the early twentieth century. Her life is courage, deep cultural immersion, and an unquenchable thirst for the unknown.

Of the old royal line, and a writer and contributor to the lifestyle-and-culture pages of French Vogue before he moved to Brazil — where he took me under his wing at Brazilian Vogue. A person of great, humble style, and someone I remain grateful to.

The Victorian explorer and linguist who lived a life of staggering adventure. The burning of his journals by his wife after his death remains one of the great historical mysteries - a final layer of intrigue over the whole legacy.

A legendary line of thirteenth-century Welsh physicians who set down a vast repository of herbal and folk remedies - the bridge between the ancient healing arts and the documented history of medicine.

The bedrock of domestic knowledge, from an era when knowing how to live was a comprehensive skill. Enquire Within even lent its name to Tim Berners-Lee's early precursor to the World Wide Web.

A masterwork of social history as much as a cookbook. Hartley documented the rhythms of English life through the kitchen, proving that domestic habits are the truest reflection of a culture.

A visionary in floral design and the domestic arts, who turned home styling away from rigid Victorian formality toward naturalism and artistic expression.

The German master who set out to photograph an entire society. His life's work, People of the 20th Century, sorted his countrymen — farmers, tradesmen, artists, officials — into an unflinching, plainly-lit typology, every sitter met with the same quiet dignity. The Nazis seized and destroyed the printing plates of his Face of Our Time; the vision survived, and has shaped documentary portraiture ever since.

Often called the first modern fashion photographer. From 1913 he brought a pictorialist's eye to the pages of Vogue and Vanity Fair - soft focus, backlighting and a silvery shimmer that turned a gown or a face into something luminous and dreamlike, and taught the century that fashion could be photographed as art.

For half a century a defining eye at Vogue. The German-American master built his pictures like sculpture - theatrical light, plaster columns and a neoclassical calm - most famously in the 1939 Mainbocher Corset, an image of such poise it has never dated.

An American original who moved between Vogue fashion, portraits of the artists and writers of his circle, and the dancers of Balanchine's young ballet. His surrealist-tinged lighting and his pioneering, tender studies of the male nude - kept largely private in his lifetime - now read as decades ahead of their time.

An odd thing to find in this list, I admit — the Detroit studio that reinvented how America's carmakers sold their cars from the 1950s to the 1970s, trading the static product shot for cinematic, aspirational imagery. I had the good fortune to assist one of their past employees, who passed on the discipline.

The Italian photographer behind the United Colors of Benetton campaigns — provocative, often shocking images that dragged race, AIDS and war onto the billboards and forced advertising to mean something. I worked alongside him in Paris as an assistant - his energy was intoxicating, and I loved every minute of my time with him.

One of the most courageous photojournalists of the twentieth century, whose stark, unflinching record of conflict forces the viewer to face the brutality of the human condition — with empathy. I spent a day with him and couldn't quite believe how quiet and unassuming his presence was; a good friend of mine made a film about him and Harold Evans.

A fellow countryman who made America his home. His closing speech - an impassioned plea for kindness over tyranny - still gives me chills, even as I find his conduct towards women, highly controversial and fraught, far harder to forgive.

A titan of French cinema, essential for his critique of the social classes and his deeply humanist, yet fatalistic, view of society.

The most singular partnership in British cinema - the English director Michael Powell and the Hungarian-born writer Emeric Pressburger, who fled the Nazis to make his life in England. From the early 1940s they shared a single joint credit as writers, producers and directors of every film. Working as The Archers - their own company, heralded by an archery-target logo - they made pictures of lavish colour, sweeping romance and unembarrassed strangeness, set defiantly against the grain of wartime realism and unmistakably their own.

Their great run still astonishes - The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943), A Canterbury Tale (1944), I Know Where I'm Going! (1945), A Matter of Life and Death (1946), Black Narcissus (1947) and The Red Shoes (1948). As a young boy I watched A Matter of Life and Death, and I still recall that moment.

A classic study of the meeting point of military hierarchy, individual morality and the futility of war - a masterwork on the abuse of power and the absurdity of conflict.

A 1974 neo-noir, written by Robert Towne — a private detective wading into a web of water, money and family corruption in 1930s Los Angeles. Beautiful and fatalistic, and unmatched at showing how power quietly rewrites a city while everyone looks the other way.

A haunting anti-war statement about a soldier trapped inside his own body - a visceral reference for the horror of conflict and the silent suffering of its victims.

The Australian-British journalist and documentary-maker who spent fifty years telling the stories power would rather bury - from Cambodia's year zero to East Timor, and the quiet workings of empire. Unfashionable, often abrasive, and exactly the kind of witness the mainstream needs more of.

A pioneer of media ecology and a critic of technology's hold on human perception. His San Francisco non-profit - where I was glad to lend my own work - remains a testament to ethical design.

I include her uneasily, as one must. The German director's Triumph of the Will (1935) and Olympia (1938) reinvented the moving camera - tracking rails, cranes, aerial and underwater shots, rhythmic montage - and much of how film and sport are shot today descends from them. That brilliance was placed in the service of the Nazi regime, and no amount of craft redeems what it glorified. She remains a hard, necessary lesson: that technical genius is not the same as, and never excuses, moral judgement.

A master of the absurd, whose humour was a necessary rebellion against the rigidity of society - proof that laughter is often the most profound response to a nonsensical world.

The "father of public relations" and a nephew of Sigmund Freud — and the reason this one comes with a warning rather than a welcome. He pioneered mass manipulation, his "engineering of consent" exploiting the public's subconscious fears and desires and treating it as an irrational herd to be steered toward consumption.

Not someone to be wary of, but a voice worth heeding. Even now it warns against concentrated power and the merchants who would rig the market in their favour - apt as ever, as a handful of corporations take hold of the world while we lose ourselves in a carefree life of technology, awash in tools we never dreamt of, rather than staying watchful.