Curated playlist
Alumni of Balliol College, Oxford
- Frederick S. BoasFrederick S. Boas gave Thomas Kyd, author of The Spanish Tragedy, a scholarly edition in 1901.
- Boris JohnsonBoris Johnson's earliest recorded ambition was to be "world king". He was born on the 19th of June 1964 on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. He is one of only two British prime ministers to have been an American citizen. Supporters praise…
- Ghislaine MaxwellOn the 29th of December 2021, a federal jury in New York convicted Ghislaine Maxwell of sex trafficking of a minor. Maxwell, a British former socialite, had moved for decades through the social circles of London and Manhattan. Her friends…
- A. C. BradleyA 1926 poem imagined Shakespeare failing an exam for not reading his critic. The critic was A. C. Bradley.
- Adam SmithAdam Smith once walked straight into a tanning pit while talking about free trade.
- Aldous HuxleyAldous Huxley died the same day as John F. Kennedy, and almost nobody noticed. C. S. Lewis died that afternoon too.
- David Wootton (historian)David Wootton's 2006 book Bad Medicine traces doctors doing harm back to Hippocrates.
- Henry Edward ManningCardinal Manning died wearing a locket with his late wife's portrait. Caroline had died 55 years earlier.
- Jasper GriffinAn Oxford classicist coined a word that chemists now use. Jasper Griffin's word "agostic" was adopted by Malcolm Green.
- John HicksEconomist John Hicks called his own famous diagram a classroom gadget. He made the IS-LM model in 1937.
- Arnold Toynbee (historian, born 1852)Toynbee Hall, a Whitechapel settlement house, was named for a historian who died at thirty.
- William BeveridgeWilliam Beveridge lost his seat in 1945, yet the new government built his welfare plan.
- Alexis SandersonAlexis Sanderson left Oxford for Kashmir and studied with a Shaiva guru for six years. He later held an Oxford chair.
- Christopher HitchensOn the 8th of October 2011, Christopher Hitchens collected the Richard Dawkins Award at the Texas Freethought Convention. It was his final public appearance. Christopher Eric Hitchens, a British and American author and journalist, had been…
- H. J. RoseH. J. Rose's A Handbook of Greek Mythology, first published in 1928, became a standard student reference.
- Jed S. RakoffJed Rakoff ruled against his own circuit's insider trading rule, and the Supreme Court unanimously agreed in 2016.
- John KeeganJohn Keegan taught war for 26 years but never fired a shot in anger. Illness left the historian unfit for service.
- Robert SoutheyRobert Southey wrote the original story of Goldilocks and the Three Bears. He was also Poet Laureate for thirty years.
- James BurnhamJames Burnham's 1941 book The Managerial Revolution helped inspire Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four.
- George SteinerGeorge Steiner was born Francis George Steiner on the 23rd of April 1929. He was a literary critic, essayist, philosopher, novelist and educator, and he is described as both French and American. Harriet Harvey-Wood, a former literature…