Quixotic clearly has its origin in the Spanish romance written by Cervantes Don Quixote which was published in two parts in 1605 and 1615. The hero and his servant Sancho Panza fight injustice wherever they see it, often unsuccessfully. The book can be regarded as the world’s first novel and was an immediate bestseller across Europe, being translated into French, Italian and also German soon after publication. Unusually for the time, the first translation was into English, with the First Part coming out in 1612 and the Second Part in 1620. Thus the idea of a romantic but unrealistic knight who even fought against windmills came to England very quickly, almost at the same time as the original. The British poet John Cleveland was the first person to show his knowledge in writing, describing in book his knowledge of the romance, stating in 1644 how “the Quixotes of this age fight with the windmills of their own heads”. There were other variations of the name over the next hundred years or so – quixotical, quixotic, quixotish, but it is quixotic which became most common, meaning idealistic in a naïve fashion.
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