Cyril Edwin Mitchinson Joad (12 August 1891 – 9 April 1953) was an English philosopher, author, teacher and broadcasting personality.

Joad socialised with other Fabians like Agnes Harben and her husband, and was quoted on the experience of meeting suffragettes recovering from hunger strike mixing with the 'county set'.

[5] Joad, along with George Bernard Shaw and Bertrand Russell, became unpopular with many who were trying to encourage men to enlist as soldiers to fight for their country.

Joad later said that his separation had caused him to abandon his feminism and instead adopt a belief in the "inferior mind" of women.

He described sexual desire as "a buzzing bluebottle that needed to be swatted promptly before it distracted a man of intellect from higher things."

Joad was "short and rotund, with bright little eyes, round, rosy cheeks, and a stiff, bristly beard.

In 1930, he left the civil service to become Head of the Department of Philosophy and Psychology at Birkbeck College, University of London.

[5] On aesthetics he was incurably platonic: on listening to the "lowering effect" of Debussy's music, he felt his "vitality and zest for life draining away";[8] jazz and swing music are "sounds which do not strictly belong to the class of music at all";[9] Dylan Thomas's "A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London" was partly "meaningless... some of the allusions baffle the intellect";[10] symbolism in art is "often used as a device... for disguising the fact that there is nothing to communicate",[11] citing Denton Welch's "Narcissus Bay" as an example; and in her "persistent refusal to grade, to give moral marks or to assign values", he found Virginia Woolf's work leaving him feeling that "nothing seems to be very much worth while".

"[13] Joad crusaded to preserve the English countryside against industrial exploitation, ribbon development, overhead cables and destructive tourism.

In January 1940 Joad was selected for a BBC Home Service wartime discussion programme, The Brains Trust, which was an immediate success, attracting millions of listeners.

He involved himself in psychical research, travelling to the Harz Mountains to help Price to test whether the 'Bloksberg Tryst' would turn a male goat into a handsome prince at the behest of a maiden pure in heart; it did not.

He argued against immortality and spirit communication, preferring his "mindlet" hypothesis which held that bundle of ideas which were formerly regarded as the mind of the dead person may survive death for a temporal period of time.

His developed and matured discussion techniques, his fund of anecdotes and mild humour brought him to the attention of the general public.

Although there was opposition from Conservatives, who complained about political bias, the general public considered him the greatest British philosopher of the day and celebrity status followed.

As Joad had become so well known, he was invited to give after-dinner speeches, open bazaars, even advertise tea, and his book sales soared.

This made front-page headlines in the national newspapers, destroyed his hopes of a peerage and resulted in his dismissal from the BBC.

[citation needed] Joad renounced his agnosticism and returned to the Christianity of the Church of England, which he detailed in his book The Recovery of Belief, published in 1952.

He died on 9 April 1953[28][29] at his home, 4 East Heath Road, Hampstead, aged 61, and was buried at Saint John's-at-Hampstead Church in London.

Joad was one of the best known British intellectuals of his time, as well known as George Bernard Shaw and Bertrand Russell in his lifetime.

"[31]Joad was invited to appear at the Socratic Club, an undergraduate society at Oxford University, where he spoke on 24 January 1944, on the subject "On Being Reviewed by Christians", an event attended by more than 250 students.

This re-examination eventually led to his return to the Christian faith of his youth, an event he mentioned in The Recovery of Belief.

Joad is also mentioned in Stephen Potter's book Gamesmanship, as his partner in a tennis match in which the two men were up against two younger and fitter players who were outplaying them fairly comfortably, until Joad asked his opponent whether a ball that had clearly landed way behind the line was in or out; an event which Potter says made him start thinking about the concept of gamesmanship.