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Nicolas Hardy Walter (22 November 1934 – 7 March 2000) was a British anarchist and atheist writer, speaker and activist. ==Career overview== Walter was born in London; his father was the neurophysiologist and pioneer of cybernetics, William Grey Walter. After serving his National Service in the RAF (where he learned Russian at the Joint Services School for Linguists, and was engaged in SIGINT), Walter studied history at Exeter College, Oxford, 1954–57, afterwards becoming a journalist. He was deputy editor of ''Which?'' (1963–65); press officer for the British Standards Institution (1965–67); and chief sub-editor of the ''Times Literary Supplement'' (1968–74). He was also a staff writer for the ''Good Food Guide''. Walter was editor of ''New Humanist'', published by the Rationalist Press Association, for a decade, and he was to continue to work in the humanist, rationalist and secularist movement until his retirement from it in 1999. In 1973, Walter was diagnosed with testicular cancer. As a result of the consequent treatment Walter had eventually to use a wheelchair. The cancer was found to have returned shortly after Walter's retirement, and he died very soon afterwards. Walter was a prolific letter writer to newspapers and magazines, estimating towards the end of his life that he had had over 2,000 published under his own name as well as under pseudonyms such as 'Jean Raison', 'Arthur Freeman' and 'Mary Lewis'. Walter was a regular user of the British Library, and was not only the first person through the doors of the British Library's Euston Road site when it was opened in 1997, but also the first person to complain about it. He also had a reputation for pedantry, and when Charles Moore stepped down as editor of ''The Spectator'', he described Walter as one of the bores he would not miss. But Walter rejected the accusation in a column in ''New Humanist'': I sometimes feel that I have become the Gradgrind of the Humanist movement. "Now, what I want is Facts", says Mr Gradgrind at the beginning of Charles Dickens' novel ''Hard Times''. "Facts alone are wanted in life." As a matter of fact, I don't think facts alone are wanted, but I do think they are a good start to any discussion.〔''New Humanist'', Vol. 112 (4), December 1997, p. 20.〕 Walter joined the Labour Party at university, but had abandoned it for anarchism and peace activism by 1959. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Nicolas Walter」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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