Curated category
1931 births
- Rupert MurdochRupert Murdoch kept a bust of Lenin in his rooms at Oxford. The young man from Melbourne who would one day own hundreds of newspapers, television channels…
- Yasuo ŌtsukaYasuo Otsuka was a Japanese animator whose career touched nearly every major studio in the history of Japanese animation.
- Sam CookeSam Cooke walked into a recording session in the mid-1950s and began singing George Gershwin. Art Rupe, the head of Specialty Records, was furious.
- Mikhail GorbachevMikhail Gorbachev was born on the 2nd of March 1931 in Privolnoye, a village in the North Caucasus, into a peasant family so poor his parents had married as…
- Jack SwigertJack Swigert was born on the 30th of August, 1931, in Denver, Colorado, and he died on the 27th of December, 1982, seven days before he was supposed to be…
- Larry LieberLawrence D. Lieber arrived in Manhattan on the 26th of October 1931 to parents Celia and Jack Lieber, Romanian-Jewish immigrants who had built a life in New…
- Allen KleinAllen Klein was the man who simultaneously managed the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, and he did it by weaponizing the fine print.
- Tommy Moore (musician)Tommy Moore played drums with the Beatles for barely two months in 1960, and most people have never heard his name. He was not Pete Best, who would later be…
- Boris YeltsinBoris Yeltsin climbed atop a tank outside the Russian parliament on a sweltering August day in 1991 and delivered a speech that would echo across the…
- David Seyfort RueggDavid Seyfort Ruegg was born on the 1st of August 1931, and over the following nine decades he became one of the most respected scholars of Buddhist…
- Sofia GubaidulinaOn the 24th of October 1931, a girl named Sofia Gubaidulina was born in the city of Chistopol within the Tatar Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic.
- Eric IvesEric William Ives was born on the 12th of July 1931 in Romford, Essex, into a Plymouth Brethren family. He died on the 25th of September 2012, leaving behind…
- Barbara LevickBarbara Mary Levick made two solo trips to Turkey in the mid-1950s, a young woman travelling alone through Anatolia at a time when the field of epigraphy was…
- Walter BurkertWalter Burkert was born on the 2nd of February 1931 in Neuendettelsau, Germany, and over the course of a long career he changed how the modern world thinks…
- Irvin D. YalomIrvin David Yalom was born on the 13th of June 1931 in Washington, D.C. His Jewish parents had emigrated from Belarus about fifteen years before his birth.
- E. L. DoctorowEdgar Lawrence Doctorow was born on the 6th of January 1931 in the Bronx, named after Edgar Allan Poe by parents who ran a small music shop and dreamed in…
- Irfan HabibIrfan Habib was born on the 12th of August 1931, into a family where history was not merely an academic pursuit but a lived inheritance.
- Mário ZagalloMário Zagallo was standing on the pitch at the Maracanã Stadium as a young soldier in 1950, watching Uruguay defeat Brazil in one of the most painful moments…
- Colin WilsonColin Henry Wilson spent a winter sleeping rough on Hampstead Heath in a sleeping bag, working by day at the British Museum's Reading Room on a novel he had…