Leading cultural anthropologist Anton Blok sheds new light on the lives and achievements of pioneers who revolutionised science and art over the past 5 centuries, demonstrating that adversity rather than talent alone was crucial to their success. Through a collective biography of some 90 radical innovators, including Erasmus, Spinoza, Newton, Bach, Sade, Darwin, Melville, Mendel, Cezanne, Curie, Brancusi, Einstein, Wittgenstein, Keynes and Goodall, Blok shows how a significant proportion in fact benefitted from social exclusion.