Curated category
English autobiographers
- Charlie ChaplinCharlie Chaplin was sent to a workhouse twice before the age of nine. By 14, he had taken his own mother to an infirmary, watched her return to a mental…
- Agatha ChristieAgatha Christie holds a record no living novelist can claim: more than two billion copies of her books sold, making her the best-selling fiction writer of…
- Virginia WoolfVirginia Woolf walked into the River Ouse on the 28th of March 1941, her pockets weighted with stones. She had just finished her last novel, Between the…
- Michael CaineMaurice Joseph Micklewhite was born on the 14th of March 1933 at St Olave's Hospital in Rotherhithe, a working-class district of London, the son of a fish…
- Thomas HardyThomas Hardy died at Max Gate on the 11th of January 1928, but not before dictating one final poem to his wife from his deathbed.
- Margaret ThatcherMargaret Hilda Thatcher arrived at 10 Downing Street on the 4th of May 1979 and kept a portrait of her Oxford chemistry tutor on the wall throughout her time…
- Michael OwenMichael Owen scored one of the most talked-about goals in England's football history at the age of eighteen. Running from near the halfway line against…
- 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…
- Judi DenchJudi Dench stood on stage at the Academy Awards in 1999 and, clutching her Oscar, quipped that for eight minutes of screen time she should only get a little…
- John Stuart MillJohn Stuart Mill was reading Greek at the age of three. By eight he had worked through Aesop's Fables, Xenophon's Anabasis, the whole of Herodotus, and six…
- George HarrisonGeorge Harrison was born at 12 Arnold Grove in Wavertree, Liverpool, on the 25th of February 1943, in a terraced house on a cul-de-sac with an outdoor toilet…
- Eric ClaptonEric Patrick Clapton was born on the 30th of March 1945 in Ripley, Surrey, to a sixteen-year-old mother and a Canadian soldier who had already shipped back…
- Mick FleetwoodMick Fleetwood was born on the 24th of June 1947 in Redruth, Cornwall, and would go on to do something almost no one in rock and roll ever manages: he kept…
- Pattie BoydPatricia Anne Boyd was born on the 17th of March 1944 in Taunton, Somerset. Her father Colin Ian Langdon Boyd served in the Royal Air Force before the family…
- Colin WilsonColin Henry Wilson spent a winter sleeping rough on Hampstead Heath in a sleeping bag, working by day at the British Museum's Reading Room on a novel he had…