Curated playlist
Alumni of University College London
- Mahatma GandhiOn the day India won freedom, Gandhi refused to celebrate. He fasted and spun cloth in Calcutta, pleading for peace.
- Christopher NolanChristopher Nolan has no smartphone and no email address. He hand-delivers his scripts to the actors he wants.
- Francis CrickFrancis Crick was editing a manuscript on his death bed. He co-deciphered the DNA double helix in 1953.
- Rabindranath TagoreAt sixteen, Rabindranath Tagore fooled experts with poems he called lost classics.
- Chris MartinChris Martin, the English singer and pianist born on the 2nd of March 1977, composed a three-minute instrumental called "Electric Thunder" when he was 12 years old. In February 2020, a former fellow pupil found it on a cassette tape.…
- Alexander Graham BellAlexander Graham Bell was honored after his death in an unusual way. When his funeral ended, for one minute at 6:25 p.m. Eastern Time, every telephone on the continent of North America was silenced. The man being remembered is credited…
- Demis HassabisDemis Hassabis changed one letter to turn a Greek word for butcher into his surname. He later won a Nobel Prize.
- Geoffrey EltonGeoffrey Elton argued that Thomas Cromwell, more than Henry VIII, drove a revolution in English government.
- Lionel RobbinsLionel Robbins refused to sign John Maynard Keynes's Depression-era draft. They later reconciled.
- Hannah FryHannah Fry told a BBC Four audience in 2018 that she was about to simulate a fatal outbreak across the whole United Kingdom. If the experiment worked, she said, it would "save lives when, not if, a real pandemic hits." The programme was…
- Patrick CurryPatrick Curry argues that Tolkien was more of a Green subversive than a conservative.
- 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.…