The old boy, at 35, revelled in the excellence of those around him and used it only to inspire himself on to greater heights, running past and even through people, showing off the excellence of his technical skills with hand and boot and generally bringing a smile to everyone's face.
He visited memorials to two of his heroes - the 19th-Century education reformer Jules Ferry and the great Polish-French scientist Marie Curie - as if to inspire himself from their example.
After he died, found among his things was a list he compiled to inspire himself in his goal to be an All-American wrestler.
Perhaps his ideas will come to inspire young people in the future, much as the life of Simón Bolívar, the great liberator of Latin America, inspired Mr. Chávez himself.
Patel was in inspired form himself, following his half-century with four wickets to hasten Derbyshire's demise.
"It would be pretentious of me to say so," said Karl Lagerfeld, when asked if the looks that he sent down the runway were inspired by himself.
Peter Stein, who once inspired controversy himself, has of late favored straightforward storytelling but does so to a fault in Verdi's "Don Carlo," even failing to exert a firm directorial hand.
What Hamilton loved so much about Joyce was the mastery of language, the fluency of movement, the "polyphony of tongues, codes, ideolects" that released and inspired Hamilton himself to try out "some implausible associations in paint".
So not only could I and my anonymous commentator debate the feminist critique of The Silence of the Lambs but, should he feel so inspired, Thomas Harris himself could respond, in a conversation directly related to the text itself.
