Curated playlist
1941 deaths
- Virginia WoolfVirginia Woolf walked into the River Ouse on the 28th of March 1941, her pockets weighted with stones. She had just finished her last novel, Between the Acts, and the Second World War had destroyed both her London homes. But what drew her…
- James JoyceJames Augustine Aloysius Joyce was born on the 2nd of February 1882 at 41 Brighton Square, Rathgar, Dublin, and died 58 years later in Zurich after surgery for a perforated ulcer. Between those two dates he produced a body of work so…
- Rabindranath TagoreRabindranath Tagore was eight years old when he wrote his first poetry. At sixteen, he released substantial poems under the pseudonym Bhanusimha, meaning Sun Lion, and claimed they were the lost works of a newly discovered 17th-century…
- Alfonso XIIIAlfonso XIII was carried naked to the prime minister on a silver tray moments after he was born, already a king. His father, Alfonso XII, had died the previous year, making this infant born on the 17th of May 1886 the ruler of Spain from…
- Arthur EvansArthur Evans knelt in a flower-covered hill on the Greek island of Crete in March 1900, and within a few months he had uncovered one of the most complex structures the ancient world had ever produced. The site at Knossos contained more…
- James George FrazerJames George Frazer was born on the 1st of January 1854 in Glasgow, Scotland, the son of a chemist named Daniel F. Frazer. He would spend most of his life inside the walls of Trinity College, Cambridge, rarely venturing far from the…
- Rudolf HilferdingRudolf Hilferding died in a Paris prison in February 1941, in the Gestapo dungeon of La Santé, after being tortured. He had, a few days earlier, been handed over by the police of Vichy France to the very regime he had spent years…
- Walther NernstWalther Nernst drove a car with a cylinder of nitrous oxide bolted to it, injected directly into the carburetor for extra power. This was not a stunt. It was the natural behavior of a man who sold a lightbulb patent for one million marks…
- Freeman Freeman-Thomas, 1st Marquess of WillingdonFreeman Freeman-Thomas, 1st Marquess of Willingdon, was born on the 12th of September 1866 into a family with deep ties to the British establishment. His maternal grandfather, Henry Brand, had served as Parliamentary Secretary to the…
- Dmitry MerezhkovskyDmitry Sergeyevich Merezhkovsky was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature nine times and never won it. He co-founded Russian Symbolism, helped invent the philosophical novel, and spent the final two decades of his life in exile,…
- El LissitzkyEl Lissitzky spent his final months of 1941 ill in Moscow, his tuberculosis now in its gravest stage. Yet he kept working. One of his last pieces was a propaganda poster calling on the Soviet people to build more tanks for the fight…