He was on J Edgar Hoover’s FBI watch list for suspected “communist sympathies” and harrassed for years. The violent death which ended his promising life still has the mists of conspiracy swirling around it (even as recently as 1998 his widow Coretta Scott King won a “wrongful death” civil lawsuit against the government). But decades later, he is remembered as the most enduring icon of the civil rights and non-violence movement in our lifetime. The accolades speak for themselves - the youngest person to ever be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, TIME magazine’s Man of the Year (1963), Grammy Award winner (1971) for Best Spoken Word Recording, Second Most Admired Person of the Century (Gallup Poll), third Greatest American of All Time (Discovery Channel and AOL poll).

What I love most about Martin Luther King was his ability to inspire with words, to persuade us to reach for higher ideals and better purposes – something he achieved through electrfying speeches that still ring out in the national conscience across the span of so many years. And there is no finer example of this than his “I Have A Dream” speech.

"I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: 'We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.'"

This was the epoch-making speech that forced the Kennedy administration to rush through civil rights legislation in Congress, the speech that has influenced our national character and will continue to influence unborn generations to come.

I often wonder what it must have been like, to stand as one of the two hundred thousand-strong audience on that August day in 1963, mesmerised and euphorious by turns, listening to King’s words ring out from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. To paraphrase Erasmus, “…it would be hard to find anyone who was more truly a man for all seasons and all men…”