Curated playlist
19th-century atheists
- Friedrich NietzscheOn the 3rd of January 1889, in the streets of Turin, Friedrich Nietzsche caused a public disturbance and two policemen approached him. An often-repeated tale holds that he had watched a horse being flogged across the Piazza Carlo Alberto,…
- Percy Bysshe ShelleyPercy Bysshe Shelley was drowned in a storm off the Italian coast on the 8th of July 1822, age 29, before most of the world had ever read a word he wrote. His boat, the Don Juan, had been custom-built in Genoa, and his second wife Mary…
- 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…
- Karl MarxOn the 14th of March 1883, at a quarter to three in the afternoon, Friedrich Engels left Karl Marx alone in his armchair for scarcely two minutes. When he returned, he found his lifelong friend peacefully gone to sleep, but forever. The…
- Friedrich EngelsFriedrich Engels was born on the 28th of November 1820 in Barmen, a Prussian industrial town his contemporaries called the "German Manchester". He would spend his adult life moving between factory offices, revolutionary barricades,…
- Vladimir LeninVladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, the man the world would come to know as Vladimir Lenin, took the name from no person at all. He first used it in December 1901, and one theory ties it to the Siberian Lena River. He often wrote it as N. Lenin,…
- Mikhail BakuninMikhail Bakunin spent three years chained in the Peter and Paul Fortress in St. Petersburg, alone in a cell, with no certainty he would ever leave alive. He had already been sentenced to death. He had already been extradited once and tried…
- Vissarion BelinskyVissarion Belinsky died on the eve of his arrest. The Tsar's police were coming for him on account of his political views, but consumption took him first in 1848. He was one of the most influential literary critics Russia had ever…
- Peter KropotkinPeter Kropotkin was born in Moscow on the 9th of December 1842, in the Konyushennaya district, which translates as the Equerries district. His father owned serfs in three provinces. His family descended from the princes of Smolensk. By the…
- Bertrand RussellBertrand Russell was born on the 18th of May 1872 in a country house called Ravenscroft, in Trellech, Monmouthshire, into one of the most prominent liberal families of the British aristocracy. He would live for 97 years, bridging the…
- Vinayak Damodar SavarkarVinayak Damodar Savarkar died on the 26th of February 1966 at his residence in Bombay, having renounced food, water, and medicine twenty-five days earlier. He called this act prayopavesha, and he had written an essay arguing that when a…
- Jane Ellen HarrisonJane Ellen Harrison once lectured on Athenian gravestones in Glasgow, and 1,600 people turned up to hear her speak. That is a striking turnout for a talk about ancient funerary carvings. Harrison spent her career at Newnham College,…
- Harriet MartineauHarriet Martineau was born on the 12th of June 1802 in Norwich, England, the sixth of eight children in a Unitarian family of French Huguenot ancestry. When she was not yet thirty, her father's textile business collapsed and her father…