THE anthropologist, author and anarchist David Graeber died aged 59 on Wednesday, his partner Nika Dubrovsky announced on Twitter today.

“Yesterday the best person in a world, my husband and my friend died in a hospital in Venice,” Ms Dubrovsky announced.

The cause of death was unknown, but Graeber had tweeted in August that he had “been sick for a month” with an illness that caused a “weird soapy taste in my mouth, exhaustion, stomach [and] lung-ache.”