Curated playlist
Alumni of Christ Church, Oxford
- Miranda KaufmannMiranda Kaufmann grew up in London. The city, she later said, is one where "just walking down a London street is often a history lesson in itself." The history she devoted her career to, though, had been missing from that lesson for a long…
- Lewis CarrollCharles Lutwidge Dodgson was born on the 27th of January 1832 at All Saints' Vicarage in Daresbury, Cheshire, the third oldest of 11 children, and the world would come to know him by a name he invented for himself: Lewis Carroll. That name…
- John LockeJohn Locke composed his own obituary in Latin, and it begins with a command to a passerby. "Stay traveller: near this place lies JOHN LOCKE." The tablet, he wrote, was a record that would quickly perish. The man it marked was an English…
- John WesleyOn the evening of the 24th of May 1738, John Wesley went very unwillingly to a religious society on Aldersgate Street in London. Someone there was reading aloud Martin Luther's preface to the Epistle to the Romans. About a quarter before…
- W. H. AudenW. H. Auden died on the 29th of September 1973 in a Vienna hotel room, a few hours after reading his poems aloud at the Palais Pálffy. He had planned to return to Oxford the following morning. Instead, he was buried five days later in the…
- William Forrest (poet)William Forrest was an English Catholic priest who stood close enough to the demolition of St Frideswide's Priory to watch Cardinal Wolsey's new college rise on its ruins. That moment of witness captures something essential about this…
- Michael FlandersMichael Henry Flanders stood six feet three inches tall, was a fine oarsman and quarter-miler, and by the time he reached Oxford his contemporaries had no doubt he would become the Olivier or Donat of his generation. His biographer and…
- William CamdenWilliam Camden was born in London on the 2nd of May 1551, into a city that had barely begun to reckon with its own past. His father Sampson Camden belonged to the Worshipful Company of Painter-Stainers, a guild world of craftsmen and…
- Philip SidneyPhilip Sidney died on the 17th of October 1586, at the age of 31, from a wound to the thigh he had received at the Battle of Zutphen. He left behind an unfinished romance whose third book breaks off in the middle of a sword fight. He left…
- John RuskinJohn Ruskin was born on the 8th of February 1819 at 54 Hunter Street, Brunswick Square, London, into a household where a wine importer father read Byron aloud and a devout evangelical mother drilled him through the Bible from cover to…
- John DowlandJohn Dowland was buried at St Ann's, Blackfriars, London, on the 20th of February 1626, and almost nothing of what he experienced in his final years found its way into music. That silence at the end of a long career stands in sharp…
- Gabriel Turville-PetreGabriel Turville-Petre entered the world at Bosworth Hall in Husbands Bosworth, Leicestershire on the 25th of March 1908. He was the youngest of five children born to Lieutenant-Colonel Oswald Henry Philip Turville-Petre and Margaret Lucy…
- Donald SwannDonald Ibrahim Swann was born on the 30th of September 1923 in Llanelli, Carmarthenshire, Wales, the son of a Russian doctor and a Turkmen-Russian nurse who had both fled the Russian Revolution. His father's family traced its origins to a…
- 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…
- Henry Vassall-Fox, 3rd Baron HollandHenry Richard Vassall-Fox, 3rd Baron Holland, inherited a barony before he could speak. In December 1774, at one year old, he became the 3rd Baron Holland after his father's early death. His mother died soon after, before his fifth…
- A. L. RowseA. L. Rowse was born on the 4th of December 1903 in Tregonissey, a village near St Austell in Cornwall, the son of a china clay worker. He went on to publish roughly 100 books, hold a senior fellowship at the Huntington Library in Southern…