Curated playlist
Alumni of the University of London
- Mahatma GandhiOn the day India won freedom, Gandhi refused to celebrate. He fasted and spun cloth in Calcutta, pleading for peace.
- Nelson MandelaNelson Mandela wore a Springbok shirt to the 1995 Rugby World Cup final. He gave the trophy to an Afrikaner captain.
- Neville ChamberlainNeville Chamberlain waved a single sheet of paper at a crowd after signing away part of Czechoslovakia.
- H. G. WellsH. G. Wells described atomic bombs in a 1914 novel. Physicist León Szilárd later said reading it stayed with him.
- Queen CamillaQueen Camilla, born Camilla Rosemary Shand, is the second wife of King Charles III and queen of the United Kingdom and 14 other Commonwealth realms. In 1999, around 200 photographers and reporters from across the world crowded in to watch…
- Francis CrickFrancis Crick was editing a manuscript on his death bed. He co-deciphered the DNA double helix in 1953.
- John SnowIn 1854, John Snow had a London council remove a water pump's handle during a cholera outbreak.
- John Lynch (historian)Historian John Lynch went from British Army service to decades studying Spanish America's revolutions.
- George SorosAt 14, George Soros posed as the Christian godson of a government official to survive the Nazi occupation of Hungary.
- B. R. AmbedkarB. R. Ambedkar said he would be the first to burn India's Constitution. He had chaired the committee that drafted it.
- Desmond TutuDesmond Tutu, the South African Anglican archbishop who spent decades confronting apartheid, asked to be laid to rest in a plain pine coffin. It was the cheapest one available, chosen to avoid any ostentatious display. He died of cancer on…
- Geoffrey EltonGeoffrey Elton argued that Thomas Cromwell, more than Henry VIII, drove a revolution in English government.
- Ronald CoaseRonald Coase faced twenty skeptical senior economists in 1960 and gradually won them over.
- Richard AldingtonRichard Aldington replaced banned words in his war novel with asterisks so readers could see the censoring.
- Frank McLynnFrank McLynn won a Classics scholarship to Oxford, then dropped Classics. He chose subjects he expected to neglect.
- 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.…