Curated playlist
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 asylum, and slept rough in the streets of London while searching for food. Within a…
- 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 all time. She wrote 66 detective novels and 14 short-story collections, and her…
- 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 Acts, and the Second World War had destroyed both her London homes. But what drew her…
- 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 market porter. By the time he died his stage name Michael Caine would appear in more…
- 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. His death certificate listed cardiac syncope as the cause, with old age as a contributing factor. He was 87.…
- 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 there. That tutor was Dorothy Hodgkin, a Nobel laureate, and the choice said…
- 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 Argentina at the 1998 World Cup, he beat two defenders and drove the ball past the…
- 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 made him famous were not the ones he cared most about writing. Alan Alexander Milne…
- 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 bit of the statuette. That self-deprecating remark captured something real. Her…
- 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 dialogues of Plato. This was not an accident. His father, James Mill, set out with…
- 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 and a single coal fire for heat. He would grow up to become the lead guitarist of…
- 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 across the Atlantic before his son drew a first breath. He grew up believing his…
- 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 the same band alive for more than half a century. Not as its most celebrated…
- 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 moved to West Lothian in Scotland. There her brother Colin arrived in 1946. The…
- 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 been rewriting for years. He was in his early twenties, broke, and so determined…