Curated playlist
Fellows of the British Academy
- C. S. LewisC. S. Lewis collapsed in his bedroom at 5:30 pm on the 22nd of November 1963, and died a few minutes later at age 64. That same afternoon, approximately 55 minutes after Lewis fell, the news wires erupted with word that John F. Kennedy had…
- John Baines (Egyptologist)John Robert Baines was born on the 17th of March 1946, and by the time he was thirty years old, he had already become one of the youngest professors at the University of Oxford. That is a striking fact about a field not known for rapid…
- Tim DysonTim Dyson's 2018 book traces India's population from the earliest modern humans to the present day. Published by Oxford University Press, "A Population History of India" spans human settlement on the subcontinent across many thousands of…
- Joseph StiglitzJoseph Stiglitz grew up in Gary, Indiana, a steel town whose economic fortunes would later give shape to many of the questions he spent a career trying to answer. His mother Charlotte was a schoolteacher. His father Nathaniel sold…
- Odd Arne WestadOdd Arne Westad was born on the 5th of January 1960 in Norway. His most contested claim is also his most influential: the Cold War was not primarily a European story. Two rival powers reshaped societies across the developing world, and the…
- A. C. BradleyA. C. Bradley was once so dominant in the study of Shakespeare that a satirical poem imagined the playwright himself failing a civil service examination because he had not read his own critic. Written by Guy Boas and published in 1926, the…
- James Graham-CampbellJames Graham-Campbell's 1995 catalogue documented Viking-Age gold and silver found across Scotland, covering a span from AD 850 to 1100. That book was one of five major publications he produced across a long career devoted to what the…
- Friedrich HayekFriedrich Hayek wrote on the 26th of October 1929, three days before the Wall Street crash, that there was no reason to expect a sudden collapse of the New York stock exchange. Decades later, the Nobel committee would praise him as one of…
- Esther DufloEsther Duflo was born on the 25th of October 1972 in Paris, and by the age of 46 she had become the youngest person ever to win the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences. She shared that prize in 2019 with her husband Abhijit Banerjee…
- Jasper GriffinJasper Griffin coined a word that ended up in chemistry. That word, 'agostic', was later adopted by the organometallic chemist Malcolm Green to describe C-H-M interactions, a particular kind of chemical bond. Griffin was not a chemist. He…
- John Boardman (art historian)John Boardman was born in Ilford, Essex, on the 20th of August 1927, and he spent the next ninety-six years becoming one of the most prolific scholars ancient Greek art has ever produced. He died in Woodstock, Oxfordshire, on the 23rd of…
- Joan RobinsonJoan Robinson coined a word that the United States Supreme Court would still be using nearly nine decades after she invented it. In June 2019, Justice Brett Kavanaugh delivered the majority opinion in Apple v. Pepper, ruling that Apple…
- Angus DeatonAngus Deaton was born on the 19th of October 1945 in Edinburgh, Scotland, and he grew up to become one of the economists whose work most fundamentally changed how the world measures poverty and human welfare. In 2015, the Royal Swedish…
- Janet NelsonJanet Nelson died on the 14th of October 2024, at the age of 82, after years living with Alzheimer's disease. She was known to friends and colleagues by a nickname, Jinty, and she spent more than three decades at King's College London…
- Rana MitterRana Mitter was born in Cambridge on the 11th of August 1969, into a household where scholarship was the family trade. His father, Partha Mitter, taught art history at the University of Sussex. His mother, Swasti Mitter, was a professor of…
- Howard Hayes ScullardHoward Hayes Scullard was born on the 9th of February 1903 in Bedford, England, and spent his career turning the chaotic centuries of Rome's rise and fall into clear, teachable history. He died on the 31st of March 1983, leaving behind a…
- Alfred MarshallAlfred Marshall was born on the 26th of July 1842 in Bermondsey, London, the son of a Bank of England clerk named William Marshall. By the time he died in 1924, he had reshaped the way the world thinks about prices, markets, and human…
- Peter Brown (historian)Peter Robert Lamont Brown was born on the 26th of July 1935. He is an Irish historian who reshaped how scholars think about an entire era. He is widely credited with bringing coherence to the study of Late Antiquity, and many regard him as…
- Thomas William Rhys DavidsThomas William Rhys Davids was serving as Magistrate of Galle in Sri Lanka. A document written in an unfamiliar script was brought into his courtroom as evidence in a case about ecclesiastical law. He did not yet know that the script was…
- Gabriel Turville-PetreGabriel Turville-Petre entered the world at Bosworth Hall in Husbands Bosworth, Leicestershire on the 25th of March 1908. He was the youngest of five children born to Lieutenant-Colonel Oswald Henry Philip Turville-Petre and Margaret Lucy…
- Arthur EvansArthur Evans knelt in a flower-covered hill on the Greek island of Crete in March 1900, and within a few months he had uncovered one of the most complex structures the ancient world had ever produced. The site at Knossos contained more…
- James George FrazerJames George Frazer was born on the 1st of January 1854 in Glasgow, Scotland, the son of a chemist named Daniel F. Frazer. He would spend most of his life inside the walls of Trinity College, Cambridge, rarely venturing far from the…
- Stuart Hall (cultural theorist)Stuart Hall arrived in Britain in 1951 on a Rhodes Scholarship to Oxford, one young man among the first large-scale emigration of West Indians to England. He came from Kingston, Jamaica, carrying the weight of a colonial education at the…
- Lionel RobbinsLionel Robbins is remembered today for a single line: "Humans want what they can't have." That quote made him famous. But it also compresses a career spent asking what economics is actually for. Robbins led the economics department at the…
- T. D. KendrickT. D. Kendrick spent much of his life keeping secrets. In 1941, an ARP warden pulled a newborn girl alive from the rubble of a Blitz-damaged home. Her mother had died in that same raid, barely ten weeks after giving birth. The child, Sally…
- Eric HobsbawmEric John Ernest Hobsbawm was born on the 9th of June 1917 in Alexandria, Egypt, and he died on the 1st of October 2012 in London, just shy of his 96th birthday. In 2002, a right-leaning magazine called The Spectator described him as…
- Andrew Wallace-HadrillAndrew Frederick Wallace-Hadrill was born in Oxford on the 29th of July 1951, the son of a mediaeval historian. That family connection to the deep past may explain something about the direction his life took. He became one of Britain's…
- Geoffrey KirkGeoffrey Stephen Kirk was born in December 1921 in Nottingham, and by the end of his life he had produced one of the most ambitious commentaries on Homer ever attempted. The six volumes of his Iliad commentary took shape across the better…
- Ronald SymeRonald Syme published The Roman Revolution in 1939, just as fascism was tightening its grip on Europe, and the book hit the scholarly world like nothing before it. It argued that Augustus, Rome's first emperor, was not a restorer of…
- H. J. RoseHerbert Jennings Rose once sat at Board 1 in a cable match between American and English universities. On the 23rd of March 1907, he drew his game against the famous J. R. Capablanca. He was also said to have been the first Oxford…
- A. J. AyerA. J. Ayer was 26 years old when he published a book that told most of philosophy to sit down and be quiet. Language, Truth, and Logic, which appeared in 1936, declared that any statement unable to pass a test of logical or empirical…
- Frederick CoplestonFrederick Charles Copleston was born on the 10th of April 1907 in the parish of Trull, near Taunton in Somerset, and he would go on to write one of the most comprehensive accounts of philosophy ever produced in the English language. His…
- John Maynard KeynesJohn Maynard Keynes was born in Cambridge on the 5th of June 1883, the son of an economist father and a mother who would go on to become her town's second female mayor. Time magazine, when naming him one of its Most Important People of the…
- Roy PorterRoy Porter died on the 3rd of March 2002 while cycling, five months into a retirement he had barely started. He had moved to St Leonards-on-Sea with plans to learn the saxophone, tend an allotment, and travel. The poet Michael Hofmann had…
- Quentin SkinnerQuentin Skinner refused a knighthood. When Cambridge made him Regius Professor of History in 1996, one of the most prestigious academic appointments in Britain, the honor came with an offer of that title. He turned it down. His…
- A. L. RowseA. L. Rowse was born on the 4th of December 1903 in Tregonissey, a village near St Austell in Cornwall, the son of a china clay worker. He went on to publish roughly 100 books, hold a senior fellowship at the Huntington Library in Southern…
- Frank KermodeFrank Kermode was born on the 29th of November 1919 on the Isle of Man, the only son of a delivery truck driver and a former waitress, in a family he later described as of "extremely modest means." He died in Cambridge on the 17th of…
- George SteinerFrancis George Steiner was born on the 23rd of April 1929 in Neuilly-sur-Seine near Paris. His right arm withered from birth yet his mother insisted he use it as an able-bodied person would. She believed self-pity was nauseating and…
- Peter TrudgillPeter Trudgill was born on the 7th of November 1943 in Norwich, England, and grew up in the nearby area of Thorpe St Andrew. Most people have never heard of him. But if you have ever wondered why a Geordie sounds nothing like someone from…