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

The man behind the British Airways and Silk Cut campaigns. His 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.

Before him, advertising ran on a production line: the words written in one room, the picture ordered from another, and the work showed it. At Doyle Dane Bernbach, founded in 1949, he sat the art director and the copywriter at the same desk and made them build the thing together. What came out of that desk was Volkswagen: “Think Small” in 1959 and “Lemon” the year after, full pages that conceded the car was little and plain and sold it on exactly that, to a country that wanted neither. Then came Avis, admitting it was only second - “We try harder”. His case was that you cannot bore people into buying anything, and that the quickest way to be believed is to say the true thing first. Every creative department since has been laid out the way he laid his 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 down to Bournemouth Art College, and I always looked out for his covers on Management Today and his pages in British Vogue.

Of the old royal line, and a writer and contributor to the lifestyle-and-culture pages of French Vogue, where I came to know him and where he took me under his wing. A man of great elegance, his style drawn straight out of his own family’s history, eccentric with it, and carrying none of the grandness his birth entitled him to. Someone I remain grateful to.

A master of witty, conceptual typography. As a co-founder of Brownjohn, Chermayeff & Geismar, he bridged the gap between modernism and humour, and he remains the benchmark for designers who believe an idea should be as sharp as its execution.

The perfectionist eye behind those catalogues. I loved his sense of style - he knew exactly how to place every object in a room set so the whole page came right.

His writing bridges traditional Japanese aesthetics and modern design, teaching the beauty of imperfection, transience and the unrefined.

The man who turned industrial design into a profession - the Lucky Strike packet, the Shell and Exxon marks, the Greyhound Scenicruiser, the Studebaker Avanti, locomotives, refrigerators, and at the far end of it the inside of Skylab, where he argued NASA into giving the crew a window to look out of. His rule was MAYA: Most Advanced Yet Acceptable. Push a design as far forward as it will go, then stop at the point people will still take it, because the most advanced thing nobody buys has designed nothing. It sounds like a compromise and is actually a discipline, and most of those who sneer at it have never had to sell anything.

A leading French modernist, and far less remembered than he should be, largely by his own doing: he asked that his archives be destroyed when he died in 1945, and they were. In 1926 he was handed a short cul-de-sac in the 16th arrondissement and designed the whole of it as a single composition, every house his, and the city then named the street after him while he was still alive to walk down it. I lived at number 10, built in 1927 as the house and studio of the twin sculptors Jan and Joël Martel, who made the Cubist concrete trees for the 1925 Exposition that gave Art Deco its name. It still had its original fittings, and living in it was a joy.

A Swiss designer who drew Neue Haas Grotesk in 1957 for the Haas foundry, to Eduard Hoffmann’s brief. Renamed Helvetica three years later so it would travel, it became the most widely set typeface of the century - airports, tax forms, the New York subway, half the logos you could name. Its virtue is that it holds no opinion: set anything in it and the letters stand aside. That is also the charge against it, and both are fair. Worth remembering that a thing now used everywhere was still drawn by somebody, by hand, one letter at a time.

Forty years at Braun, and the 606 shelving for Vitsœ that is still being made sixty years on. His ten principles of good design are the only such list anyone bothers to quote, and the last is the one that bites: good design is as little design as possible. Pick up almost any Apple object of the past thirty years and you are holding an argument with a Braun calculator from 1977. He has been generous about Apple and sharp about nearly everything else - his point was things built to last rather than built to be replaced, which is the part of him least often copied.

A Roman who took on Paris and beat Chanel at being interesting, if never at being rich. Her first success in 1927 was a black jumper with a white bow knitted into it that looked tied and was not - a joke you had to look at twice, which is the whole of her method. She worked with Dalí on a dress printed with a lobster and a hat in the shape of a shoe, with Cocteau on embroidery that read as two faces or a vase depending on how you looked at it, and she put coloured plastic zips on the outside of couture at a time when a zip was something you hid. Shocking pink is hers, and so is the scent in a bottle shaped from Mae West. Chanel called her “that Italian artist who makes clothes” - meant unkindly, and exactly right.

He held that if you can design one thing you can design everything, then spent fifty years proving it - the New York subway map and the standards manual behind it, the American Airlines mark that lasted forty-six years, Knoll, book jackets, furniture, a church interior, dresses. He worked almost entirely within about six typefaces and considered the rest noise. His 1972 subway diagram put legibility ahead of geography; New York disliked it and replaced it inside seven years, and every transit map drawn since has had to answer it. The Vignelli Canon he gave away free, which tells you what he thought the work was for.

The “complete designer” of houses, wallpapers, textiles and furniture, who set it all down 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 enquiries into aesthetics - his theory of the Sublime - and his foundational influence on political and historical thought.

The Oxford logical positivist whose Language, Truth and Logic, written at twenty-four and published in 1936, set out to clear the ground: a statement means something only if it can be checked against the world or is true by definition, and the rest - metaphysics, theology, a good deal of ethics - is not false but empty. He softened the position later, as the young usually do. What survives is the discipline of it: before arguing about an answer, ask what would count as evidence for it.

Gaoled in 1918 for opposing the war, and still marching against the bomb in his eighties. Principia Mathematica set out to put arithmetic on unshakeable foundations and did not quite manage it, which he took better than most would. The lasting part is plainer than the logic: hold your beliefs in proportion to the evidence for them, and be suspicious of anyone entirely certain, yourself included.

A German-Jewish political philosopher who fled the Nazis and spent the rest of his life in Chicago reading the ancients very slowly. His argument was that philosophers writing under censorship wrote on two levels - a surface for the authorities and a quieter one for the careful reader - and that we had lost the art of hearing the second. His method has since been claimed by people he might not have chosen, which is a lesson in itself. The instruction stands on its own: read the thing, slowly, before reading what has been said about it.

The “philosopher of pessimism”, who held that the force beneath everything is blind, insatiable and indifferent. His focus on aesthetics, the inner life and the nature of human suffering makes him essential for anyone in pursuit of intellectual independence.

Digressive beyond all reason: it sets out to dissect one condition 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, 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. 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.

Poet, painter, printmaker and his own publisher - he engraved and coloured the books himself because nobody else would touch them. Thought mad in his lifetime and buried in an unmarked grave, he is now read as the one Englishman who saw what the factories would do to people while they were still being built. He held that the eye was a window to see through rather than with, and the whole of the work follows from that. “I must create a system, or be enslaved by another man’s” is as good a motto as this page has.

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 biochemist by training who gave the next fifty years to it, and left a monument to intellectual scope and cross-cultural understanding.

A Cambridge mathematician who spent his life on two machines neither of which was finished - the Difference Engine, to calculate and print mathematical tables without human error, and the Analytical Engine, which had a store, a mill, punched cards and conditional branching, and was a computer in everything but the building of it. His quarrel was with the tables themselves: astronomical and navigational tables, the Nautical Almanac among them, were worked out by hand, by people, and the mistakes in them put ships on rocks. “I wish to God these calculations had been executed by steam” is said to have been muttered over a sheet of them. Ada Lovelace saw further than he did about what such a machine might do beyond arithmetic, and said so in a footnote longer than the paper it annotated.

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. 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 on. He had understood that the difficulty was never storing knowledge but finding the way back into it - every link on this page is his thought, fifty years early and worked out on paper. Douglas Engelbart spent his working life building what the essay described, and called it augmenting human intellect, pointedly not artificial intelligence. Bush drew the same line, between the repetitive thought he was content to hand to a machine and the creative thought he did not expect one to reach. My guess is that he would have taken to the new machinery quickly and then asked the awkward question, because his trails could be inspected, re-followed and argued with - and an answer arriving with no path behind it is the one thing his whole design was built to prevent.

He wrote the proposal at CERN in 1989, built the first browser and the first server, and then talked CERN into putting the whole thing into the public domain in 1993 - no patent, no licence, no royalty. That decision is the reason the web happened at all rather than some walled thing that never would have. He has spent the years since arguing that it went wrong in most of the ways he feared, which is harder work than inventing it was. His first attempt, written at CERN in 1980, he called Enquire - after Enquire Within upon Everything, the Victorian household manual that also has a place on this page.

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 think-tank dinners a handful of times - kindnesses I remain grateful for.

He set the standard for investigative journalism and editorial integrity, and transformed the paper while he was at it. 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 was one of courage, deep cultural immersion and an unquenchable thirst for the unknown.

The Clifton suspension bridge at twenty-four, the Great Western Railway at twenty-six, and then three ships each the largest in the world in its turn - the Great Western, the Great Britain, the Great Eastern - the last of which ruined him and very nearly killed him. He laid his track to a gauge of seven feet because it rode better, and lost that argument; he drove the line out of Paddington almost dead flat because he thought a railway ought to be, and won that one. What still startles is the scope: bridges, tunnels, stations, rolling stock and the ships waiting at the far end, all designed as one continuous journey from London to New York.

A life of staggering adventure - and then his wife burned his journals after his death, one of the great historical mysteries and a final layer of intrigue over the whole legacy.

Born and schooled in Shrewsbury, which makes him a Shropshire man like me. Five years on the Beagle, and then more than twenty in a house in Kent among barnacles, earthworms, orchids and pigeons before he would publish what he had largely worked out early. He was not hesitating, he was checking. On the Origin of Species appeared in 1859 only because Wallace had arrived at the same idea and forced his hand. The patience is the part worth copying: he spent two decades hunting for what would disprove him, and when he published he set out the strongest objections himself, in a chapter of his own book.

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.

A Welsh draper’s apprentice from Newtown, not far from where I was born, who ended up running the New Lanark cotton mills and used them to argue a case: that character is formed by conditions, and that a mill which housed, fed and schooled its workers would out-produce one that ground them down. He was right about New Lanark and wrong about nearly everything after it - New Harmony collapsed inside three years - but the co-operative movement, the infant school and the eight-hour day all trace back to him. He wanted eight hours labour, eight hours recreation, eight hours rest, at a time when fourteen at the loom was ordinary.

A palaeobotanist by training, and a serious one - her work on coal measures stood on its own. The clinic opened in 1921, free of charge, at a time when the subject could not be discussed in print; Married Love had sold out in a fortnight three years before. For a great many women it was the first practical control they had ever had over their own lives, and that is not a small thing.

She also held views on eugenics that were repellent even by the standards of a decade that entertained them, campaigning for the sterilisation of those she judged unfit and cutting off her own son over the woman he married. Both are true at once. The clinic does not cancel the rest, and the rest does not unbuild the clinic.

A Hereford brewer’s traveller, photographer and inventor who, riding the Herefordshire hills in 1921, saw that old churches, standing stones, moats and hilltops fell into straight lines across the country. He set it out in The Old Straight Track in 1925 and called them leys: the remains, as he read them, of prehistoric ways surveyed point to point. Archaeology never accepted it, and the idea was later carried off into places he would not have recognised. What lasts is the habit - reading a landscape for the marks people left in it, and trusting the eye over the map. He was a serious photographer too: his Bee Meter was among the first practical exposure meters, which is a very Watkins way of going about it - look hard at a thing, then build the instrument to measure it.

Enquire Within upon Everything appeared in 1856 under the editorship of Robert Kemp Philp, and stayed in print for a hundred and twenty years across more than a hundred editions. It told you how to write a letter of condolence, lift a stain out of silk, carve a joint, treat a burn, draw up a will and conduct yourself at a ball. It was not arranged in chapters but in numbered paragraphs with an index at the front - you looked up a number and went straight to it, and the numbers pointed at one another. That is why Tim Berners-Lee, who found a copy in his parents’ house, called the program he wrote at CERN in 1980 Enquire. A Victorian household manual taught him what a link was.

Mrs Beeton’s Book of Household Management followed in 1861, eleven hundred pages of it, and did something quieter that has lasted just as well: she moved the ingredients to the top of the recipe, with quantities, timings and what the dish would cost. The format is hers and nobody has improved on it since. She was twenty-five when it came out, she had compiled a great deal of it from other people’s books without saying so, and she was dead at twenty-eight. Both volumes assume something we have largely let go of - that running a life is a skill, and that it can be written down.

A Shropshire-born maid-of-all-work who kept a diary for thirty-six years at the insistence of Arthur Munby, the barrister she married in secret and would not live with as a wife. What survives is close to unique: a day-by-day account of Victorian domestic labour written by the woman actually doing it rather than by anyone employing her - the grates, the steps, the coal, the hours. The relationship it records was strange and unequal, and historians still argue over how much of the diary is hers and how much was performed for him. The scrubbing is hers.

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 towards naturalism and artistic expression.

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.

Born in Ludlow in 1830 and apprenticed to a bookseller there before he ever touched a camera. In 1858 he printed five negatives into a single picture - Fading Away, a girl dying of consumption - and was attacked for it, partly for the subject and partly for the deceit. He answered in Pictorial Effect in Photography: a photograph is a made thing like any other picture, and composition is the photographer’s job rather than the lens’s. A good deal of what advertising photography does descends from that argument. The rest of it is still arguing back.

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 - but from the 1950s to the 1970s they reinvented how America’s carmakers sold their cars, trading the static product shot for cinematic, aspirational imagery. I had the good fortune to assist one of their former employees, who passed on the discipline.

The Italian photographer behind the United Colors of Benetton campaigns - confrontational, 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.

Born Endre Friedmann in Budapest and unable to sell his pictures, he and Gerda Taro invented a rich American photographer called Robert Capa and sold them as his - and then he became him. What he made on Omaha Beach on the morning of 6 June 1944 came back blurred, ruined in a London darkroom by the usual account, and that blur is now how the landings look to everyone who was not there. In 1947 he co-founded Magnum so that photographers would keep their own negatives, which is a quieter achievement and possibly the larger one. His line was that if your pictures are not good enough you are not close enough. He meant it literally, and it killed him in Indochina in 1954.

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, which was controversial and fraught, far harder to forgive.

A Sicilian who came through Ellis Island at six and went on to make the most American films there are - It Happened One Night, Mr Smith Goes to Washington, Meet John Doe. Critics coined “Capra-corn” for the sentiment and he is patronised for it still, though the films are harder than the label allows: Mr Smith is about a legislature that cannot be shamed, and It’s a Wonderful Life is two hours of a man being ground down before it turns. That one lost money in 1946 and was half forgotten until its copyright renewal went unfiled; it fell into the public domain in 1974, television could run it for nothing, and it was run until it became the film everyone assumes they always loved. The best-loved picture of the century, rescued by a clerical oversight.

Essential for his critique of the social classes, and for a view of society that is deeply humanist and fatalistic at once.

The English director Michael Powell worked with the Hungarian-born writer Emeric Pressburger, who had fled the Nazis to make his life in England. From the early 1940s they shared a 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.

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.

Haunting and claustrophobic: a soldier trapped inside his own body, a visceral reference for the horror of conflict and the silent suffering of its victims.

Australian-British, and fifty years spent 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, the Public Media Center - 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 moral judgement, and never excuses its absence.

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 least famous man in that story. Blues Incorporated, the band he ran with Cyril Davies from 1961, was less a group than a doorway - Jagger, Richards, Brian Jones, Charlie Watts, Jack Bruce, Ginger Baker, Graham Bond and Long John Baldry all came through it or played alongside it, and nearly all of them ended up better known than he ever was. He seemed not to mind. He lived near where I was born, and a good deal of what I listened to growing up reached me through him.

Liverpool College of Art took him in and could not do much with him, but the drawing never stopped - quick, spare line drawings he made all his life, and two books of nonsense prose, In His Own Write and A Spaniard in the Works, that belong beside Lear and Carroll rather than beside anything else by a pop singer. The same economy is in the songs: there is nothing in “Working Class Hero” that could be taken out. He sent back his MBE in 1969 over Biafra, Vietnam and - he could not resist - “Cold Turkey” slipping down the charts, which is the whole man in one sentence: serious, and unable to be solemn about it.

A nephew of Sigmund Freud, and the reason this section exists at all. He pioneered the industrial management of opinion, his “engineering of consent” exploiting the public’s subconscious fears and desires and treating it as an irrational herd to be steered towards consumption.

A Viennese psychologist who reached New York in 1938 and spent the next forty years telling American companies what their customers actually wanted, as against what they said they wanted. He called it motivational research, ran it from a house above the Hudson, and questioned people at length about soap, cars and cake in the manner of an analyst with a patient. A convertible is a mistress; a saloon is a wife. A good deal of it was unfalsifiable and some of it was simply nonsense, and it worked well enough that by the 1950s few campaigns went out without it - Vance Packard made him notorious in The Hidden Persuaders in 1957. He is here because I spent a working life photographing the far end of that process, and it is worth knowing where a brief had been before it reached the studio.

The most respected American journalist of his century, and the reason Bernays had a theory to work from. Public Opinion, in 1922, argued that none of us sees more than a sliver of the world at first hand, so we act on the pictures in our heads - he gave the word stereotype its modern meaning - and that those pictures are put there by other people. His conclusion was not that the press should do better but that the public, a bewildered herd as he called it three years later, should be managed by a specialised class able to see clearly on its behalf. Bernays lifted the phrase manufacture of consent from him and dropped the hesitation that came with it. Read him for the diagnosis, which remains exact, and then watch what he does with it.

An engineer of genuine gifts who found in 1921 that tetraethyl lead stopped engines knocking, and in 1930 that chlorofluorocarbons made a safe refrigerant. Both were triumphs at the time. Both turned out to be among the worst things ever put into the air: leaded petrol poisoned a century of children, and CFCs opened the hole in the ozone layer. He knew about the lead - men at the plants making it died, and he answered a press conference by washing his hands in the stuff and breathing its vapour to show it was harmless, having himself spent the previous year recovering from lead poisoning. A historian has written that he had more impact on the atmosphere than any other single organism in history. He died in 1944, strangled by the rope-and-pulley contraption he had built to lift himself out of bed after polio. He belongs beneath every confident piece of engineering on this page: the side you cannot see is usually the side that matters.

Not a voice to be wary of, but one 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.

Scientific management, he called it: break a job into its smallest movements, time each one, throw away what the stopwatch cannot justify, and hand the worker a method settled somewhere else by somebody else. The Principles of Scientific Management appeared in 1911 and remade the factory, then the office, and in the end the warehouse and the delivery round. He was not a cruel man and he believed the gains would be shared. They were not, much. He is here because two people on this page answer him directly - Robert Owen, who had set out sixty years earlier to prove that decency paid better, and Bill Bernbach, who spent a career dismantling the production line Taylor had installed in the creative business. Wherever a job is measured instead of understood, this is where it began.