1875–1954 · British publisher, writer and political publicist
Sir Ernest John Pickstone Benn, 2nd Baronet, built the publishing house Benn Brothers out of his father’s trade journals and spent his later life as a combative pamphleteer for individualism and against state economic control. He came from one of Britain’s most political families — brother of the Labour politician William Wedgwood Benn and uncle of Tony Benn — and argued the opposite case to most of them, in books such as Confessions of a Capitalist (1925). The epigram that keeps escaping to Groucho is very much his register: a professional controversialist’s dry summary of the trade he spent decades attacking.