Curated playlist
Alumni of St John's College, Cambridge
- William WordsworthWilliam Wordsworth was born on the 7th of April 1770 in what is now called Wordsworth House in Cockermouth, Cumberland, a market town sitting at the edge of the Lake District. He died on the 23rd of April 1850 at Rydal Mount, the same…
- William Cecil, 1st Baron BurghleyWilliam Cecil, 1st Baron Burghley, was the man one biographer said could not be separated from the queen he served. Writing in the Encyclopædia Britannica Eleventh Edition, A. F. Pollard put it directly. 'From 1558 for forty years,' he…
- Robert Cecil, 1st Earl of SalisburyRobert Cecil, 1st Earl of Salisbury, stood at Queen Elizabeth I's bedside in the winter of 1603. He told the dying monarch she must go to bed. Elizabeth roused herself to deliver a sharp rebuke. 'Little man, little man,' she told him,…
- Robert Greene (dramatist)Robert Greene died on the 3rd of September 1592, reportedly after a surfeit of pickle herring and Rhenish wine. He was 34 years old, buried in the New Churchyard near Bedlam, and within days his name had spread across London not because of…
- Paul DiracPaul Adrien Maurice Dirac was born on the 8th of August 1902 in Bristol, England, and died on the 20th of October 1984 in Tallahassee, Florida. In the eighty-two years between those dates, he wrote an equation that predicted the existence…
- Howard Hayes ScullardHoward Hayes Scullard was born on the 9th of February 1903 in Bedford, England, and spent his career turning the chaotic centuries of Rome's rise and fall into clear, teachable history. He died on the 31st of March 1983, leaving behind a…
- Samuel Butler (novelist)Samuel Butler was born on the 4th of December 1835 at the rectory in Langar, Nottinghamshire. His father Rev Thomas Butler had been a son of Dr Samuel Butler who served as headmaster of Shrewsbury School before becoming Bishop of…
- Alfred MarshallAlfred Marshall was born on the 26th of July 1842 in Bermondsey, London, the son of a Bank of England clerk named William Marshall. By the time he died in 1924, he had reshaped the way the world thinks about prices, markets, and human…
- Henry Wriothesley, 3rd Earl of SouthamptonHenry Wriothesley, 3rd Earl of Southampton, was born on the 6th of October 1573 at Cowdray House in Sussex, and before he turned eight his father was dead and Queen Elizabeth had sold the right to control his marriage for £1,000.…
- John DeeJohn Dee was born in the Tower Ward of London on the 13th of July 1527. His father Rowland Dee served as a mercer and courtier to Henry VIII. The family name Dee comes from the Welsh word du, meaning black. Dee traced his lineage back to…
- Thomas Wyatt (poet)Sir Thomas Wyatt died on the 11th of October 1542, at around age thirty-nine, and was buried at Sherborne Abbey. He had lived fast and dangerously close to the most lethal court in English history. He had stood in the Tower of London while…
- Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of OxfordEdward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford was born on the 12th of April 1550 at Hedingham Castle in Essex, heir to the second-oldest earldom in England. His father died when he was twelve, leaving him a ward of Queen Elizabeth and placing him in…
- Thomas NasheThomas Nashe was baptised in Lowestoft on the 30th of November 1567, the son of a curate who would eventually be awarded the living at the church of All Saints in West Harling. That modest Suffolk beginning gave little sign of what was…