Jane Austen needed just a small walnut tripod table adorned with nothing but a quill and a pot of ink to write about the trials and tribulations of the Bennets, while Mark Twain conjured the adventures of Huckleberry Finn from a desk buried in a sea of paper.

Steve Jobs favoured unwieldy piles of folders and notebooks flanking a large Apple monitor, and by comparison Bill Gates’ desk looks like something from Architectural Digest. Before them both, every nook and cranny of Thomas Edison’s bureau was crammed with endless rolls of paper (among them, no doubt, the blueprints for his many inventions) and Einstein’s was, put simply, pure chaos. Alan Turing, for his part, got by with just a typewriter and a few stacks of notes at Bletchley, while Sigmund Freud kept his desk artfully arranged with antiquities.

The Telegraph London