Curated playlist

British Army personnel of World War I

Alfred HitchcockAt age five, Alfred Hitchcock was sent to a police station with a note and locked in a cell.
J. R. R. TolkienOn his 21st birthday, Tolkien proposed by letter to a woman who was already engaged.
C. S. LewisC. S. Lewis died the same afternoon President Kennedy was shot. His death was almost swallowed by the news from Dallas.
William FaulknerWilliam Faulkner never told his daughter he had won the Nobel Prize. She heard it when the principal called her in.
Winston ChurchillWinston Churchill escaped a prisoner-of-war camp in Pretoria by hiding on freight trains. It made him famous.
Raymond ChandlerRaymond Chandler sold his first story for $180 after losing his oil job at forty-four.
Edward VIIIEdward VIII, King of the United Kingdom, ended his reign with a voice on the radio. On the night of the 11th of December 1936 he spoke to listeners around the world. He told them he had found it "impossible to carry the heavy burden of…
A. A. MilneA. A. Milne accused his old cricket teammate P. G. Wodehouse of near treason.
Ernest ShackletonErnest Shackleton and two men crossed South Georgia's mountains on foot to fetch a rescue.
Clement AttleeClement Attlee told the King, "I've won the election," and the King replied that he already knew.
Bernard MontgomeryBernard Law Montgomery lay in an open field at Méteren on the 13th of October 1914, shot through the right lung by a sniper. The village sits near the Belgian border at Bailleul. Montgomery was a young officer of the Royal Warwickshire…
Alexander FlemingAlexander Fleming, a Scottish physician and microbiologist, walked back into his London laboratory on the 3rd of September 1928 after a family holiday in Suffolk. Before leaving, he had spread staphylococci across culture plates and left…
John BuchanJohn Buchan, the Scottish novelist, ended his life as Lord Tweedsmuir, Governor General of Canada. In Montreal in 1937 he stood with a typed speech that reporters already held. By hand, he added the words "and to Canada's King" to a line…
Lionel RobbinsLionel Robbins refused to sign John Maynard Keynes's Depression-era draft. They later reconciled.
T. D. KendrickT. D. Kendrick's own daughter did not know he was her father. He was a British Museum archaeologist.
T. E. LawrenceT. E. Lawrence wrote that he once crossed the Sinai Peninsula, from Aqaba to the Suez Canal, in just 49 hours without any sleep. His own notebooks say otherwise. The famous camel ride took more than 70 hours and included two long breaks…
Richard AldingtonRichard Aldington replaced banned words in his war novel with asterisks so readers could see the censoring.
G. Wilson KnightG. Wilson Knight directed and acted in Shakespeare's tragedies to test his own ideas.