Curated playlist
Alumni of Trinity College, Cambridge
- James Clerk MaxwellScottish physicist and mathematician (1831–1879)
- Christopher Kelly (historian)Christopher Kelly, a British-Australian classicist and historian born in London and raised in Sydney, has spent his career asking a question that most people never think to ask: what actually held the later Roman Empire together, and what…
- J. J. ThomsonJ. J. Thomson, born on the 18th of December 1856 in Cheetham Hill, Manchester, grew up in a household shaped by antiquarian books and a mother rooted in the local textile trade. He never became the locomotive engineer his parents once…
- Lord ByronLord Byron got up at two in the afternoon. By the time he sat down to dinner, the house around him resounded with the unarbitrated quarrels of ten horses, eight enormous dogs, three monkeys, five cats, an eagle, a crow, and a falcon, with…
- Alfred, Lord TennysonAlfred Tennyson was born on the 6th of August 1809 in Somersby, a small village in Lincolnshire, and by the time he died on the 6th of October 1892, lines from his poems had entered everyday English speech so thoroughly that most people…
- Jawaharlal NehruJawaharlal Nehru was sworn in as prime minister at the stroke of midnight on the 15th of August 1947, and he raised the Indian flag at the Red Fort in Delhi. His speech that night carried a phrase that would outlive him: a tryst with…
- A. A. MilneA. A. Milne taught himself to read at the age of two. That detail feels right for a man who would spend his life in thrall to words, though the books that made him famous were not the ones he cared most about writing. Alan Alexander Milne…
- Robert Devereux, 2nd Earl of EssexRobert Devereux, the 2nd Earl of Essex, once walked into Queen Elizabeth's bedchamber at Nonsuch Palace one morning. She was not yet, in the words of one account, "properly wigged or gowned." It was an act of extraordinary presumption.…
- Isaac NewtonSir Isaac Newton said his mother told him he was so small at birth that he could have fit inside a quart mug. He was born prematurely on Christmas Day, the 25th of December 1642, at Woolsthorpe Manor in Lincolnshire. His father, also named…
- James Graham-CampbellJames Graham-Campbell's 1995 catalogue documented Viking-Age gold and silver found across Scotland, covering a span from AD 850 to 1100. That book was one of five major publications he produced across a long career devoted to what the…
- Kim PhilbyKim Philby died in Moscow on the 11th of May 1988, buried with the honours of a KGB General. His fourth wife, Rufina Ivanovna Pukhova, told a reporter that he was "disillusioned with Communism by the end of his life, tortured by his…
- Vladimir NabokovVladimir Nabokov arrived in the United States in May 1940 aboard the SS Champlain, a Russian exile who spoke three languages and had already written nine novels that almost nobody in America had read. He was forty years old, nearly broke,…
- Francis BaconFrancis Bacon dictated his last letter from a borrowed bed in Highgate, his fingers, he wrote, so disjointed with sickness that he could not steadily hold a pen. He compared himself to Caius Plinius the elder, who lost his life testing an…
- Daniel YerginDaniel Howard Yergin was born on the 6th of February 1947 in Los Angeles, California, and by the time he finished his fourth book, he had written what would become one of the most widely read works of economic history in the English…
- Nicholas CraftsNicholas Francis Robert Crafts entered the world on the 9th of March 1949 in Nottingham, England. He attended Brunts Grammar School in Mansfield before moving to Trinity College Cambridge. The young student graduated with a Bachelor of…
- William DalrympleWilliam Dalrymple first arrived in Delhi on the 26th of January 1984, a teenager who had grown up on the shores of the Firth of Forth in North Berwick, Scotland. He was eighteen years old. What drew him there, and what kept him returning…
- John DrydenJohn Dryden was attacked at around 8 pm on the 18th of December 1679, beaten by hired thugs in Rose Alley behind the Lamb and Flag pub in Covent Garden. He had been walking home from Will's Coffee House, where London's literary wits…
- Austen ChamberlainAusten Chamberlain won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1925, yet never became prime minister. He served in Parliament for 45 years, led his party, and shaped European diplomacy in its most dangerous decade since Napoleon. And still, history has…
- Oliver Locker-LampsonOliver Stillingfleet Locker-Lampson was born on the 25th of September 1880 into a family of poets, diplomats, and naval heroes, and he spent the next seven decades doing his best to outrun every expectation that inheritance placed on him.…
- Sogyal RinpocheSogyal Rinpoche was born Sonam Gyaltsen Lakar in 1947 in the Trehor region of Kham, Tibet, and would go on to become one of the most widely read Buddhist teachers in the Western world. His book, The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying, has…
- James George FrazerJames George Frazer was born on the 1st of January 1854 in Glasgow, Scotland, the son of a chemist named Daniel F. Frazer. He would spend most of his life inside the walls of Trinity College, Cambridge, rarely venturing far from the…
- Chris WeitzChris Weitz delivered an unsolicited 40-page treatment to New Line Cinema in 2003. Nobody at the studio had asked for it. He wanted to direct The Golden Compass, the first book in Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials series. He decided to…
- Raymond WilliamsRaymond Henry Williams was born on the 31st of August 1921 in Pandy, a village just north of Llanfihangel Crucorney, near Abergavenny in Wales. His father worked on the railway. Every railwayman in that village voted Labour, while the…
- Bertrand RussellBertrand Russell was born on the 18th of May 1872 in a country house called Ravenscroft, in Trellech, Monmouthshire, into one of the most prominent liberal families of the British aristocracy. He would live for 97 years, bridging the…
- Niels BohrNiels Bohr once described the tension at the heart of all good teaching as the struggle between "Klarheit und Wahrheit" - clarity and truth. It was a conflict he never entirely resolved, and it drove him to build an entirely new picture of…
- Arthur EddingtonArthur Stanley Eddington stood at the center of one of the most dramatic moments in twentieth-century science. On the 29th of May 1919, during a total solar eclipse observed from the island of Príncipe off the west coast of Africa, he…
- Freeman Freeman-Thomas, 1st Marquess of WillingdonFreeman Freeman-Thomas, 1st Marquess of Willingdon, was born on the 12th of September 1866 into a family with deep ties to the British establishment. His maternal grandfather, Henry Brand, had served as Parliamentary Secretary to the…