Curated playlist
1883 births
- Benito MussoliniBenito Mussolini was named after a Mexican president. His father, a blacksmith and a socialist, chose the name Benito for the liberal Mexican leader Benito Juárez. The middle names, Andrea and Amilcare, honored the Italian socialists…
- Clement AttleeClement Attlee walked into Buckingham Palace on the 26th of July 1945 to be appointed Prime Minister. King George VI stood waiting. Both men were famously reluctant talkers. A silence stretched between them until Attlee finally offered:…
- Franz KafkaFranz Kafka asked a friend to burn everything he had ever written. The friend was Max Brod, his literary executor, and the instruction was explicit: every diary, manuscript, letter, and sketch was to be burned unread. Brod refused. He told…
- Archibald Wavell, 1st Earl WavellArchibald Wavell lost his left eye at the Second Battle of Ypres in 1915, and he spent the next three decades commanding armies across some of the most strategically complex theatres of the twentieth century. He was a poet who disliked…
- Joseph SchumpeterJoseph Alois Schumpeter was born on the 8th of February, 1883, in Triesch, a small town in Habsburg Moravia, in what is now the Czech Republic. He died in his home in Taconic, Connecticut, on the night of the 8th of January, 1950. In…
- Karl JaspersKarl Jaspers died on the 26th of February 1969 -- his wife Gertrud's 90th birthday. That detail is small, but it says something. The two of them had survived the Nazi years together, hiding in Heidelberg while friends quietly kept them…
- Andrey VyshinskyAndrey Vyshinsky is remembered for a chilling line attributed to him from the Stalin era: "Give me a man and I will find the crime." Vyshinsky was a Soviet politician, jurist and diplomat, best known as the state prosecutor at Joseph…
- Vinayak Damodar SavarkarVinayak Damodar Savarkar died on the 26th of February 1966 at his residence in Bombay, having renounced food, water, and medicine twenty-five days earlier. He called this act prayopavesha, and he had written an essay arguing that when a…
- H. J. RoseHerbert Jennings Rose once sat at Board 1 in a cable match between American and English universities. On the 23rd of March 1907, he drew his game against the famous J. R. Capablanca. He was also said to have been the first Oxford…
- José Ortega y GassetJosé Ortega y Gasset was born on the 9th of May 1883 in Madrid, into a family that sat at the center of Spanish public life. His father ran the newspaper El Imparcial, which belonged to the family of his mother, Dolores Gasset. That…
- John Maynard KeynesJohn Maynard Keynes was born in Cambridge on the 5th of June 1883, the son of an economist father and a mother who would go on to become her town's second female mayor. Time magazine, when naming him one of its Most Important People of the…