Curated playlist
Academics of University College London
- Tarnya CooperTarnya Cooper has spent her career bringing Tudor faces back to life. As Chief Curator and eventually Curatorial Director at the National Portrait Gallery in London, she oversaw some of the most technically ambitious investigations into…
- James Graham-CampbellJames Graham-Campbell's 1995 catalogue documented Viking-Age gold and silver found across Scotland, covering a span from AD 850 to 1100. That book was one of five major publications he produced across a long career devoted to what the…
- John Lynch (historian)John Lynch was born on the 11th of January 1927 in Boldon, a small town in County Durham, in the north of England. By the time he died on the 4th of April 2018, he had spent more than half a century reshaping how the English-speaking world…
- Demis HassabisDemis Hassabis was born Dimitrios Hassapis on the 27th of July 1976, and his very surname carries a story. The original name, Hassapis, means “butcher” in Greek. At some point he executed what one colleague described as “a point mutation”…
- Thomas William Rhys DavidsThomas William Rhys Davids was serving as Magistrate of Galle in Sri Lanka. A document written in an unfamiliar script was brought into his courtroom as evidence in a case about ecclesiastical law. He did not yet know that the script was…
- James HeckmanJames Joseph Heckman was born on the 19th of April 1944, and he would go on to win the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 2000 for a statistical technique so fundamental that it now bears his name. The question at the heart of…
- A. J. AyerA. J. Ayer was 26 years old when he published a book that told most of philosophy to sit down and be quiet. Language, Truth, and Logic, which appeared in 1936, declared that any statement unable to pass a test of logical or empirical…
- 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…
- Frank KermodeFrank Kermode was born on the 29th of November 1919 on the Isle of Man, the only son of a delivery truck driver and a former waitress, in a family he later described as of "extremely modest means." He died in Cambridge on the 17th of…
- Henry MorleyHenry Morley was born in Hatton Garden, London, on the 15th of September 1822, and by the time he died in 1894, he had helped invent the very idea of studying English literature as a serious academic subject. That is a peculiar journey for…