Curated playlist
1986 deaths
- Jorge Luis BorgesJorge Luis Borges once described his blindness as a gift wrapped in cruel irony. In a poem he wrote that God, with splendid irony, granted him books and night at a single touch. By the late 1950s he was the director of the Argentine…
- Jean GenetJean Genet spent his first seven months in the care of a prostitute mother before she placed him for adoption, and from that beginning he built one of the most fiercely original bodies of work in twentieth-century French literature. He was…
- Vyacheslav MolotovVyacheslav Molotov was the only person in the twentieth century to have shaken hands with Vladimir Lenin, Joseph Stalin, Winston Churchill, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Adolf Hitler, Rudolf Hess, Hermann Göring, and Heinrich Himmler. That single…
- Andrei TarkovskyAndrei Tarkovsky was born on the 4th of April 1932 in the village of Zavrazhye, a small settlement in what is now the Kostroma Oblast of Russia. He would go on to direct just seven feature films in his lifetime. Yet Ingmar Bergman, one of…
- Simone de BeauvoirSimone de Beauvoir did not consider herself a philosopher, and at the time of her death in 1986 the world did not call her one either. Yet she wrote the sentence that opened a century of argument: "One is not born woman but becomes woman."…
- Jean MassinJean Massin was born in 1917 and died in 1986. For part of his life he answered to a different title than historian: priest. By the time he died, his name sat on studies of composers, chronicles of revolutionaries, and an edition of a…
- Urho KekkonenUrho Kaleva Kekkonen was born in a smoke sauna in a small cabin in Pielavesi, Finland, on the 3rd of September 1900. His father had built a chimney in the house just before his arrival. That detail matters, because years later, political…
- Dick JamesDick James held a telephone receiver to his record player on the 27th of November 1962. He played "Please Please Me" down the line to Philip Jones, the producer of the television show Thank Your Lucky Stars. By the end of the call, The…
- Georges DumézilGeorges Dumézil was born in Paris on the 4th of March 1898, the son of a highly educated general in the French Army. By the time he died in the same city on the 11th of October 1986, he had published more than seventy-five books, mastered…
- Margaret MastermanMargaret Masterman was born in London on the 4th of May 1910, and by the time she died in 1986, the field she had helped create had largely forgotten her name. She spent decades arguing that computers could learn to understand language,…