Curated playlist
English agnostics
- Andrew Lloyd WebberAndrew Lloyd Webber's Phantom of the Opera closed on Broadway in 2023 after 13,981 performances.
- Charles DarwinCharles Darwin likened confessing his theory to confessing a murder. He told botanist Joseph Dalton Hooker in 1844.
- Charlie ChaplinCharlie Chaplin was in a workhouse twice before he turned nine. By 26 he was among the world's highest-paid people.
- Neil GaimanNeil Gaiman is the first author to win both the Carnegie Medal and the Newbery Medal for the same book.
- Francis CrickFrancis Crick was editing a manuscript on his death bed. He co-deciphered the DNA double helix in 1953.
- George EliotGeorge Eliot was a woman who lived openly with a married man. Mary Ann Evans shared a home with him from 1854 to 1878.
- John Stuart MillJohn Stuart Mill was reading Greek at age three. His father was deliberately raising a genius.
- Daniel Day-LewisDaniel Day-Lewis collapsed sobbing during a 1989 Hamlet, in the scene where the ghost of Hamlet's father appears.
- Sting (musician)Sting, the English musician and actor born Gordon Matthew Thomas Sumner, once disowned his own first name on camera. In the 1985 documentary Bring On the Night, a journalist addressed him as Gordon. He answered, "My children call me Sting,…
- Daniel CraigIn 2021, the English actor Daniel Craig was awarded a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. It sits at 7007 Hollywood Boulevard, an address that winks at the code number 007. Two days later his final film as that famous spy opened in the…
- Aldous HuxleyAldous Huxley died the same day as John F. Kennedy, and almost nobody noticed. C. S. Lewis died that afternoon too.
- Brian MayBrian May climbed onto the roof of Buckingham Palace on the 3rd of June 2002 and played a guitar solo of "God Save the Queen." It was part of the Golden Jubilee celebrations for Elizabeth II. May, born in 1947, is the lead guitarist of the…
- Paul DiracPaul Dirac's 1928 equation predicted antimatter, and the positron appeared in 1932.
- Rosalind FranklinRosalind Franklin died one day before her virus model went on show at the Brussels world's fair.
- David AttenboroughAt 11, David Attenborough sold newts to a university for three pence each.
- Daniel RadcliffeDaniel Radcliffe, an English actor born on the 23rd of July 1989, played Harry Potter in all eight films of the series between 2001 and 2011. When he was around 14 or 15, he and his co-stars Emma Watson and Rupert Grint were offered the…
- Philip LarkinPhilip Larkin turned down the job of Poet Laureate in 1984. He felt he had long since stopped being a poet.
- Florence WelchFlorence Welch, the English singer and songwriter, chose the name of her band while the clock was running out. About an hour before her first gig, she still had no name to announce. Her best idea was Florence Robot Is A Machine, which she…
- John Maynard KeynesAt Bretton Woods in 1944, Keynes proposed a world currency called the bancor, and the United States rejected it.