Curated playlist
1903 births
- George OrwellGeorge Orwell did not exist on any birth certificate. The man behind the name was Eric Arthur Blair, born on the 25th of June 1903 in Motihari, in the Bengal Presidency of British India. He chose his pen name late, in a letter to his agent…
- Bing CrosbyBing Crosby's recording of "White Christmas" has sold over 50 million copies worldwide, making it the bestselling single of all time. That fact alone might seem to define the man, but it barely scratches the surface. Harry Lillis Crosby…
- Medard BossMedard Boss was born on the 4th of October 1903 in St. Gallen, Switzerland, and he spent his career asking a question that most psychiatrists of his era considered already settled: what is a human being? The answer Freud had given, the…
- John von NeumannJohn von Neumann once told a colleague that the second incompleteness theorem had struck a harder blow to mathematics than even its discoverer believed. He was born in Budapest in 1903 and died at age 53 in 1957, and in those years he…
- Oleg LosevOleg Vladimirovich Losev was born on the 10th of May 1903 in Tver, Russia, into a noble family whose aristocratic background would soon become a liability rather than an advantage. When the Bolshevik Revolution upended Russian society,…
- Joan RobinsonJoan Robinson coined a word that the United States Supreme Court would still be using nearly nine decades after she invented it. In June 2019, Justice Brett Kavanaugh delivered the majority opinion in Apple v. Pepper, ruling that Apple…
- Howard Hayes ScullardHoward Hayes Scullard was born on the 9th of February 1903 in Bedford, England, and spent his career turning the chaotic centuries of Rome's rise and fall into clear, teachable history. He died on the 31st of March 1983, leaving behind a…
- Raymond QueneauRaymond Queneau once calculated that a reader working through his book A Hundred Thousand Billion Poems, around the clock every day without stopping, would need 190,258,751 years to finish it. That number is not a joke. It is not a…
- Hans JonasHans Jonas died at his home in New Rochelle, New York, on the 5th of February 1993, at the age of 89. He was a philosopher born in Germany who later became an American citizen. His career moved between two subjects that seem to share…
- Nikolai PodgornyNikolai Podgorny held the highest ceremonial office in the Soviet Union for more than a decade, yet his story ends with him being physically removed from a painting. On the 24th of May 1977, a unanimous vote by the Central Committee…
- Galeazzo CianoGaleazzo Ciano voted to overthrow his own father-in-law on the 24th of July 1943, and paid for it with his life six months later. He was born Gian Galeazzo Ciano on the 18th of March 1903 in Livorno, Italy, the son of an admiral and…
- Ronald SymeRonald Syme published The Roman Revolution in 1939, just as fascism was tightening its grip on Europe, and the book hit the scholarly world like nothing before it. It argued that Augustus, Rome's first emperor, was not a restorer of…
- A. L. RowseA. L. Rowse was born on the 4th of December 1903 in Tregonissey, a village near St Austell in Cornwall, the son of a china clay worker. He went on to publish roughly 100 books, hold a senior fellowship at the Huntington Library in Southern…