Gods, Mongrels and Demons. By Angus Calder

A brantub of brief, eccentric lives prompts Christopher Fowler to spare a thought for those whose talents are unsuited to their times

There's nothing like a good gossip, and one of the best was John Aubrey, whose collected Brief Lives offered up scurrilous, colourful, opinionated and therefore thrillingly unreliable anecdotes about friends, scientists and members of the Royal Society in 17th-century London. As these potted histories included such luminaries as John Dee, Christopher Wren, Nicolaus Mercator and Edmund Halley, interest in his volume remained high through the years, culminating in a popular one-man show starring Roy Dotrice, whose daughter Michele appeared in Some Mothers Do Have 'Em. The peculiarity of biographical line that connects the architect of St Paul's to Michael Crawford's onscreen missus clearly interests the author, and at first it seems that there may be nothing more to Calder's cavalcade of careers than a kind of six-degrees connection game. Certainly, the writer of the jacket copy thought so, and Calder should take a poke at the Bloomsbury marketeer who concluded the desperate sleeve pitch with the idea of keeping his volume in the lavatory.

Gods, Mongrels and Demons is about as far from traditional bathroom stationery as it's possible to get; a swift browse through the letter A exposes the trajectories of Mary Adams (1898-1984), tiny blonde socialist whose husband co-founded the Mass Observation Society while she worked on Muffin the Mule, and George Antheil (1900-1959) whose bizarre avant-garde ballet score for xylophones and aircraft propellors made an obsessive fan of Ezra Pound before his partnership with Hedy Lamarr gave birth to a frequency-hopping patent now used in mobile phones.

At which point, one would be forgiven for thinking that Calder is quite mad, or at least drunk on the accumulation of arcane facts. Not so, for the achievements of men (and, it is pleasing to find, plenty of extremely clever and tenacious women) are placed in a greater context, between the polar mythologies of good and evil. At first, it's hard to see how this might work in a way that will enlighten the lives of mortals; the choice of biographies seems capricious, almost random. The famous jostle with the forgotten and the virtually unknown, while a few characters intersect by way of moving within the rarified circles of the late Victorian high-born. What are we to make of a book that features Walter Tull (1888-1918), the professional footballer who played for Tottenham Hotspur and became the only black man to be commissioned in the British Army in the First World War (subsequently shot through the head at the age of 29), and weird Chinese poet Li He (790-816), whose dense, decadent "modernist" work was banished until the collapse of the Chinese Empire? Or how about the travails of Irish pirate queen Grania O Malley (1530-1600) and the female Crimean sniper Liudmila Mikhailovna Pavlichenko (1916-74)?

A large number of the biographies involve those in the creative arts, and demonstrate that there is more to each life than the traditional arc of obscurity to fame. I particularly liked Jack Purvis (1906-62), aircraft pilot, soldier, criminal, carpenter, chef and eccentric jazz musician, an estate agent's son who played in the Original Kentucky Night Hawks, periodically vanishing only to reappear in different aliases and careers before setting up his unsuccessful School of Grecian Dancing for young ladies, then serving time for robbery in an El Paso jail, and finally busking his way into the twilight playing "Flight of The Bumblebee" in Honolulu. Here one is tempted to peek between the known facts and imagine a life lived on a tangent from any modern-day notion of career path creation. Similarly, we are presented with the tantalising tale of Henri Cochet (1901-87), street gamin turned tennis player, cannonball server and fastest man alive on the court, and participant in "the most mysterious match in tennis history", when Cochet's losing streak turned to 17 consecutive winning points, and the theory was floated that a group of Hindus had hypnotised his opponent.

Calder's personal interests may be discerned through the skew towards lives spent in the exploration of music, sport, theology and literature, although it's harder to explain the biographical presence of a pigeon called Winky, the animal VC winner who led an air-sea rescue to a lost Beaufort bomber in 1941. There are unfamiliar glimpses of familiar names, too; the shrouded identity of the novelist B Traven (1882?-1969) is clearly a matter of continuing fascination, while the muddied racial origin of actress Merle Oberon (1911-79) points to a life lived in denial and fear of exposure. And there are also plenty of Scottish personalities whose stories are relatively unfamiliar beyond their native fame, including Nancy Riach (1927-47), forces' sweetheart and championship swimmer who succumbed to polio, and Jeannie Robertson (1908-75), traveller and folk singer whose fame coincided with the rising popularity of the portable tape recorder.

Still, none of this quite knits together, and one can imagine Calder's editor in a quandary: are we to see the compendium as a bran-tub of oddball histories intended only for dipping into, perhaps as an illustration of fate's crueller caprices, or is some greater scheme at work? Here the CVs of the gods provide a clue, because, as Calder points out, the trickster Anancy, the generous Ganesh, ferocious yet maternal Kali and the versatile Ogun are very human, and provide an overarching conception of potentialities. Humans may aim for the heavens but are all too capable of creating their own demons, and we are provided with the examples of Billie Holiday, Wittgenstein and Mother Jones, so it becomes clear that we "mongrels", trapped between fear of failure and the need to excel, find it impossible to follow the kind of persistently steady career path favoured by those searching for role models. Certainly, Wittgenstein's badgering of Bertrand Russell to disprove the existence of a rhinoceros in the room marks him down as an intellectual aggressor blindsided by a problem any smart philosophy student could handle.

Here, perhaps, the connection between Calder's 101 humans from such opposite-enders as Babe Ruth and Beatrix Potter starts to become apparent, for it would have been much easier to assemble tales of those simply denied success by unforeseeable misfortune. Our talents are often unsuited to our times, and lights are extinguished by an accumulating weight of ill-luck (especially in the turbulent events of the past century), but here are wilfully human men and women, driven less by their beliefs than by the strengths and fissures of their personalities. It would have been impossible to stop them from choosing wrongly, but the fact that they were always willing to make a choice marks them out for remembrance in a world where spirited individuals are no longer provided with the means of taking chances. Calder's characters and their motivations are quirky, murky and possibly deranged, but these brief lives deserve to flare brightly again for anyone interested in seeing what stokes the fire of human endeavour.