If you’re an academic, before you say anything at all, you have to give about 20 caveats,” he says. “And when I was a professional academic, I used to do that. But now I take a different view. I just say I’m just putting this out for you to consider. Don’t throw it away – or if you do at least give it to Oxfam.” including bold and italic. Over 1,300 free fonts are also supported for all devices. Any other font Yes! Animated meme templates will show up when you search in the Meme Generator above (try "party parrot"). It seems like she represents the unhelpful people of society, the thieves and criminals and people who profit over other people's work. He loves the lightness of those writers who construct fabulous thought-experiments, Montaigne, Borges. “The English-speaking world associates aphorism with arrogance,” he says. “But I’m not sure other ways of writing are more likely to change minds. I don’t want followers. I don’t even expect many people to understand what I say. The whole point of the voice I have in the books is to trigger a process of thought in some readers whose outcome is uncertain.”

Alarm bells must have gone off for Gray when Dominic Cummings started promoting the powers of “super-forecasting”, while the government appeared unable to predict what was likely to happen the following day? If you think, as I do, that civilised life is like a spider’s web, easy to destroy, but hard to construct, then what I write is perhaps a caution, a warning. I’m anti-hubris.” In the last sentence of Straw Dogs, Gray asked a question, almost plaintively: “Can we not think of the aim of life as being simply to see?” Has writing the current book helped him to understand what such a life of experience might look like? The cat always lurks in the shadows, listens to other animals, watches over them. It is also the only animal which leaves the farm and visits other farms and nobody knows what it is doing there. In fact, nobody knows what it is doing anywhere, what is the work that cat does. The cat is one of the animals inherited from old system, is used then warped or discarded as the new system takes form. Cats allegiance is uncertain but it does its job well. What’s it like to be a cat? John Gray has spent a lifetime half-wondering. The philosopher – to his many fans the intellectual cat’s pyjamas, to his critics the least palatable of furballs – has had feline companions at home since he was a boy in South Shields. In adult life – he now lives in Bath with his wife Mieko, a dealer in Japanese antiquities – this has principally been two pairs of cats: “Two Burmese sisters, Sophie and Sarah, and two Birman brothers, Jamie and Julian.” The last of them, Julian, died earlier this year, aged 23. Gray, currently catless, is by no means a sentimental writer, but his new book, Feline Philosophy: Cats and the Meaning of Life, is written in memory of their shared wisdom.

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Take HS2, Gray suggests. “Always a mistake for cost and environmental reasons, but now it’s surreal, because huge numbers are never going to travel for work again, not in the way that they did. There is kind of a lag built into politics – in which adapting to a radically changed circumstance is easier to do in practice for individuals than for governments.” Cats, he says, returning to our theme, don’t have stories to which they get deeply attached. “Of course, you may say that’s because they haven’t got the intellectual capacity, but I think it’s just as likely they’re not interested.” user-uploaded templates using the search input, or hit "Upload new template" to upload your own template Does he see that 10-point plan, offered half in earnest (“as a cat would offer it”) as an answer to those people who criticised Straw Dogs for offering little in place of what it debunked? Gray predicted the election victory of Trump in 2016 for something like the same reasons – “the feeling of abandonment, and disrespect in large parts of the working population” had to go somewhere – and suggests that even in the event of a Biden victory next month, those forces will not be silenced. Human beings, particularly in extremis, should never be expected to make rational choices. “As Bertrand Russell pointed out, the first world war, when it started, was welcomed largely as an interruption of boredom.” I’ve tried to emulate what I recall of my wonderful cat Julian,” he says. “Which is, not to live in an imagined future. We simply don’t know how this is going to develop. And of course, the political response in most places, and certainly here, has been shambolic. But that inability to come up with a clear response reflects, I think, something deep: that even the most well-developed systems of knowledge always leave an enormous amount of uncertainty.”

And what does he say to those critics who argue that his writing dwells on the reductive, brutish side of humanity, as opposed to its great collective achievements? In these three-tiered times our original plan for this interview was to meet and sit outside a cafe in Bath – Gray, 72, is wary of inside – but the forecast suggested we’d have got soaked, so we have retreated, catlike, indoors, and to Zoom. In some ways, I suggest, Gray’s is the perfect book for the estranging oddness of the pandemic. How has he coped? Yes, yes,” Gray says, in his engaged and friendly voice, that still carries a north-east inflection (he chose the theme of When the Boat Comes In as one of his desert island discs). “Many people didn’t like Straw Dogs. The criticism was that I swept the board of philosophy and left nothing standing. I should say that I got some wonderful responses from people who weren’t philosophers. For example, three over the years, from war correspondents who said that adapting to what they’d witnessed, the trauma, had been one of the great struggles of their lives. And somehow my book helped them.”She skulks around and doesn't do any work, votes for both sides, and makes people satisfied enough that she never actually has to do anything. It's a free online image maker that lets you add custom resizable text, images, and much more to templates. He laughs. “Well the dentists seem pretty good.” He came to Bath after leaving academic life – having been a professor of politics at Oxford, he was for a decade professor of European thought at the London School of Economics – to become “a freelance writer”. “I was looking for a walking city,” he says. “And I like the fact here that if you look up you can see trees.” The liberation from academia has given him more liberty, he suggests, to write exactly as he pleases, cat-like. from your device or from a url. For designing from scratch, try searching "empty" or "blank" templates.

If you see it in the light, it is usually sleeping, it always looks lazy and harmless, a good person to confide in. It is insidious, friendly and purrs nicely. But it also has quite sharp claws and it's job is to find and remove vermin. It is a subtle form of control in the system. Cat is spying and doing subversive actions. It is a cloak and dagger compared to sword and shield of dogs.Protesters calling for a second referendum on Brexit, something John Gray saw as a delusional hypocrisy. Photograph: Niklas Halle’n/AFP via Getty Images