Curated playlist

1931 births

Rupert MurdochRupert Murdoch kept a bust of Lenin in his rooms at Oxford. Peers called him "Red Rupert".
Yasuo ŌtsukaA realistic skeleton in Magic Boy made audiences laugh, and it changed Yasuo Ōtsuka's view of animation.
Robert DuvallRobert Duvall died at his farm in Middleburg, Virginia, on the 15th of February 2026, at the age of 95. His wife, Luciana Pedraza, announced his death in a public statement. He had worked for seven decades, and on screen he rarely seemed…
Sam CookeSam Cooke walked into a recording session and began singing Gershwin. His label's head, Art Rupe, was furious.
Mikhail GorbachevMikhail Gorbachev refused to declare a state of emergency during the August 1991 coup.
Jack SwigertJack Swigert won a seat in Congress but died seven days before he could take it. The Apollo 13 astronaut was 51.
Larry LieberLarry Lieber could not say where he found the word uru, the name of the mystical metal from which Thor's hammer Mjolnir is made. It first appeared in the debut of Marvel's thunder god, in Journey into Mystery #83, cover-dated August 1962.…
Allen KleinFormer Beatles manager Allen Klein bought a song company and became the plaintiff suing George Harrison.
James Burke (gangster)James Burke, nicknamed Jimmy the Gent, spent his criminal life beside the Lucchese crime family without ever being allowed to join it. He was born on the 5th of July 1931. He is believed to have organized the 1978 Lufthansa heist. His…
Tommy Moore (musician)Before Pete Best, the Beatles had another drummer named Tommy Moore. He played with them for barely two months in 1960.
Jim JonesJim Jones was an American preacher who founded the Peoples Temple. On the 18th of November 1978, 912 people died at his jungle commune in Jonestown, Guyana. Among them were 304 children. Jones called the event "revolutionary suicide," a…
Boris YeltsinBoris Yeltsin climbed onto a tank in 1991 to defy a coup. Soldiers sent to crush the protest switched sides.
David Seyfort RueggL. S. Cousins called Buddhist scholar David Seyfort Ruegg "certainly the leading scholar today" on one doctrine.
Sofia GubaidulinaSoviet officials called Sofia Gubaidulina's music "irresponsible." Her work later reached the BBC Proms.
RajneeshRajneesh, born Chandra Mohan Jain, has an epitaph that says he was never born and never died. It adds that he only visited this planet Earth, between 1931 and 1990. The man behind those words was an Indian philosopher, mystic and teacher,…
Eric IvesHistorian Eric Ives spent decades arguing over Anne Boleyn, Henry VIII's second wife.
Barbara LevickOnly Barbara Levick turned her 1950s Turkey research trips into a book.
Walter BurkertWhy did the Greeks kill animals at the altar? Scholar Walter Burkert spent his life on that question.
Irvin D. YalomIrvin D. Yalom is an American psychiatrist, born on the 13th of June 1931 in Washington, D.C. He is now an emeritus professor of psychiatry at Stanford University. In 1974 he published Every Day Gets a Little Closer, a book with an unusual…
E. L. DoctorowE. L. Doctorow won the National Book Critics Circle Award three times. He mixed real and invented people.
Desmond TutuDesmond Tutu, the South African Anglican archbishop who spent decades confronting apartheid, asked to be laid to rest in a plain pine coffin. It was the cheapest one available, chosen to avoid any ostentatious display. He died of cancer on…
Irfan HabibIrfan Habib spent decades studying Mughal land and tax records. The historian argued peasant suffering was structural.
Mário ZagalloMário Zagallo was the first person to win the World Cup as both a player and a manager. He led Brazil to the 1970 title.
Colin WilsonColin Wilson finished his book The Outsider while sleeping rough on Hampstead Heath.
Roger PenroseRoger Penrose received half of the 2020 Nobel Prize in Physics for showing that the formation of black holes is a robust prediction of Einstein's general theory of relativity. The citation sounds like the summit of a single, tidy career.…
Don KingDon King, the American boxing promoter born on the 20th of August 1931, once received a blunt verdict on his career from a man he had promoted. Mike Tyson said of him: "He did more bad to black fighters than any white promoter ever in the…