Curated playlist
2002 deaths
- Thomas J. Kelly (aerospace engineer)Thomas Joseph Kelly was born on the 14th of June 1929 in Brooklyn, New York. He grew up in Merrick, a middle-class neighborhood where parents compared their children's grades to his own. Teachers at Wellington C. Mepham High School…
- Brigitte MassinBrigitte Massin was born on the 21st of July 1927 and died on the 5th of December 2002. She spent her working life as a French musicologist and journalist. Her writing often carried a second name alongside her own, a habit that shaped how…
- James TobinJames Tobin was born on the 5th of March, 1918, in Champaign, Illinois, the son of a journalist credited with inventing "Homecoming" at the University of Illinois. He died on the 11th of March, 2002, in New Haven, Connecticut, at the age…
- Martin EsslinMartin Esslin arrived in England in 1938 with almost nothing, having fled Vienna after the Nazi annexation of Austria. Within a few decades, that same man would coin a phrase that reshaped how theatre scholars talked about the stage. The…
- Peter BergmannPeter Gabriel Bergmann was born in Berlin on the 24th of March 1915, into a family that would scatter across the globe under the weight of Nazi persecution. His father Max was a biochemist who later became a professor at the Rockefeller…
- Alexander ProkhorovAlexander Prokhorov was born on the 11th of July 1916 in Atherton, Australia, the child of Russian parents who had fled Tsarist repression on the other side of the world. That unusual origin - an Australian childhood, a Russian soul, a…
- Astrid LindgrenAstrid Lindgren was born on the 14th of November 1907 in Näs, near Vimmerby, in the Swedish province of Småland. By the time she died, on the 28th of January 2002, she had sold roughly 167 million books worldwide and had been translated…
- Roy PorterRoy Porter died on the 3rd of March 2002 while cycling, five months into a retirement he had barely started. He had moved to St Leonards-on-Sea with plans to learn the saxophone, tend an allotment, and travel. The poet Michael Hofmann had…
- Abba EbanAbba Eban stood before the United Nations General Assembly in 1967 and delivered a defence of Israel so finely constructed that Henry Kissinger later said he had never encountered anyone who matched his command of the English language.…
- VaváVavá scored in two consecutive World Cup finals, a feat no other footballer managed for sixty years. Born Edvaldo Izidio Neto on the 12th of November 1934, he grew up to become one of the most feared strikers of his generation. He carried…
- Timothy ReuterTimothy Alan Reuter was born on the 25th of January 1947 into a family already woven into history. His grandfather, Ernst Reuter, had served as mayor of Berlin. That lineage did not make Reuter's career inevitable, but it perhaps gave him…