Jacques Derrida was born in Algeria in 1930 and died in France in 2004, aged 74. At school in Algiers during the collaborationist government of the early 1940s, Derrida experienced the anti-Semitism of the Pétain regime. Subsequently expelled from the Lycée de Ben Aknoun, he was sent to another institution staffed by Jewish teachers themselves expelled from the public education system. Derrida skipped school, failed exams and read. He also played football. Envying the novelist Camus, who played in goal for Algeria, he said that he would rather have been known as an international footballer than a philosopher. He was never quite sure about philosophy anyway and it is difficult to know how to label him. But that is the point. He didn't label and he wasn't interested in being labelled. A thinker distinguished above all by the way he read, he was also a prolific and inspirational writer with over 60 books translated into English, and a wealth of material yet to be translated.