Curated playlist
British agnostics
- Winston ChurchillWinston Churchill escaped a prisoner-of-war camp in Pretoria by hiding on freight trains. It made him famous.
- Neville ChamberlainNeville Chamberlain waved a single sheet of paper at a crowd after signing away part of Czechoslovakia.
- David HumeDavid Hume said his first book "fell dead-born from the press." He wrote it in France by age twenty-eight.
- Clement AttleeClement Attlee told the King, "I've won the election," and the King replied that he already knew.
- Bronisław MalinowskiBronisław Malinowski pitched a tent in the middle of a village and stayed.
- David AttenboroughAt 11, David Attenborough sold newts to a university for three pence each.
- Ludwig WittgensteinLudwig Wittgenstein, the Austro-British philosopher, published only one book of philosophy during his lifetime, and it ran to just 75 pages. He was born in Vienna on the 26th of April 1889 and died on the 29th of April 1951. Nearly…
- Bertrand RussellAt 89, philosopher Bertrand Russell went to jail for an anti-nuclear protest. Asked to behave, he said, "No, I won't."
- William BeveridgeWilliam Beveridge lost his seat in 1945, yet the new government built his welfare plan.
- Karl PopperSir Karl Raimund Popper was born in Vienna on the 28th of July 1902 and died on the 17th of September 1994. In between, he built a philosophy of science on an odd idea. The strongest theories, he argued, are the ones most exposed to being…
- Kemi BadenochKemi Badenoch was born on the 2nd of January 1980 in St Teresa's Maternity Hospital in Wimbledon, south London. Her mother, Feyi Adubifa, had travelled from Nigeria for medical treatment. She returned home shortly after the birth. The…
- 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.…