Curated playlist
Alumni of St John's College, Cambridge
- William, Prince of WalesAt 9:03 pm on the 21st of June 1982, William Arthur Philip Louis was born at St Mary's Hospital in London. He was the first direct heir to the British throne to be born in a hospital. Today he is William, Prince of Wales, heir apparent to…
- William WordsworthWordsworth's greatest poem, The Prelude, appeared only months after he died. His widow, Mary, published it in 1850.
- William Cecil, 1st Baron BurghleyWilliam Cecil signed a document barring Elizabeth from the throne, then served her as chief adviser.
- Robert Cecil, 1st Earl of SalisburyDying Queen Elizabeth I scolded Robert Cecil for telling her she must go to bed. She called him "little man" in 1603.
- Robert Greene (dramatist)Most scholars agree a pamphlet attributed to Robert Greene mocked Shakespeare as an 'upstart Crow'.
- Paul DiracPaul Dirac's 1928 equation predicted antimatter, and the positron appeared in 1932.
- Thomas HobbesThomas Hobbes, the English philosopher born in 1588 at Westport in Wiltshire, liked to say that his mother gave birth to twins: "myself and fear." He arrived early, because news had just reached the household that the Spanish Armada was…
- Howard Hayes ScullardHistorian Howard Hayes Scullard wrote chapters that were published only after he died.
- Samuel Butler (novelist)In 1863, a newspaper called The Press printed a letter signed only with the pen name Cellarius. The author was Samuel Butler, an English novelist and critic, and the letter was titled "Darwin among the Machines". It appeared four years…
- Alfred MarshallAlfred Marshall, who invented the supply and demand graph, began as a mathematician.
- Henry Wriothesley, 3rd Earl of SouthamptonShakespeare dedicated two poems to the Earl of Southampton. The earl was sentenced to death in 1601 but freed in 1603.
- John DeeJohn Dee, an English mathematician and astronomer, once sent a flying beetle soaring up to the palace of Jupiter. The stage was at Trinity College, Cambridge, and the play was Aristophanes's Peace. Dee built the effect from pulleys and…
- Thomas Wyatt (poet)Poet Thomas Wyatt's sonnets were not printed under his name until 1557. That was fifteen years after he died.
- Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of OxfordEdward de Vere, Earl of Oxford, was buried in an unmarked grave in 1604. Some still say he wrote Shakespeare's plays.
- Vikram SarabhaiVikram Sarabhai never saw the Moon lander that carries his first name. Chandrayaan-2's lander, called Vikram in his honour, was meant to touch down near the Moon's South Pole on the 20th of September 2019. The man behind the name is often…
- Thomas NasheThomas Nashe co-wrote a play so scandalous that his partner Ben Jonson went to jail.
- Roger PenroseRoger Penrose received half of the 2020 Nobel Prize in Physics for showing that the formation of black holes is a robust prediction of Einstein's general theory of relativity. The citation sounds like the summit of a single, tidy career.…