inspiration and perspiration. Beethoven rose each morning at dawn and made himself coffee.

He was fastidious about this. Each cup had to be made with exactly 60 beans, which he counted out

each time. He would then sit at his desk and compose until two or three in the afternoon.

Subsequently, he would go for a long walk, taking with him a pencil and some sheets of music paper

to record any ideas that came to him on the way. Each night after supper he would have a beer,

smoke a pipe, and go to bed early 10 p.m. at the latest.

Anthony Trollope, who as his day job worked for the post office,

paid a groom to wake him every day at 5 a.m.

By 5.30 he would be at his desk,

and he then proceeded to write for exactly three hours,

working against the clock to produce 250 words each quarter hour. This way he wrote 47 novels, many of them three volumes in length,

as well as 16 other books. If he finished a novel before the day's three hours were over, he would immediately take a fresh piece of paper and begin the next.

Emmanuel Kant, the most brilliant philosopher of modern times, was famous for his routine.

As Heinrich Heiner put it, getting up, drinking coffee, writing, giving lectures, eating, taking a walk,

everything had its set time, and the neighbours knew precisely that the time was 3.30pm when Kant stepped

outside his door with his grey coat and the Spanish stick in his hand. These details, together

with more than 150 other examples drawn from the great philosophers, artists, composers and writers, come from a book by Mason Curry entitled Daily Rituals, How Great Minds Make Time, Find Inspiration and Get to Work.

The book's point is simple. Most creative people have daily rituals.

These form the soil in which the seeds of their invention grow. In some cases they

deliberately took on jobs they did not need to do, simply to establish structure and routine

in their lives. A typical example was the

poet Wallace Stevens, who took a position as an insurance lawyer at the Hartford Accident and

...