Curated playlist
Literacy and society theorists
- Charles DickensCharles Dickens earned six shillings a week pasting labels onto pots of boot blacking in a tumble-down warehouse overrun with rats. He was twelve years old, and his father had just been locked inside the Marshalsea debtors' prison in…
- George OrwellGeorge Orwell did not exist on any birth certificate. The man behind the name was Eric Arthur Blair, born on the 25th of June 1903 in Motihari, in the Bengal Presidency of British India. He chose his pen name late, in a letter to his agent…
- 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…
- Johann Wolfgang von GoetheOn the 13th of October 1806, Napoleon's army poured into Weimar, and the least disciplined of the French soldiers, the so-called spoon guards, broke into the home of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. They drank his wine, made a great uproar, and…
- Kurt VonnegutKurt Vonnegut survived the firebombing of Dresden by hiding in a meat locker three stories underground, surrounded by hanging cadavers. "It was cool there," he said. "When we came up the city was gone... They burnt the whole damn town…
- Jorge Luis BorgesJorge Luis Borges once described his blindness as a gift wrapped in cruel irony. In a poem he wrote that God, with splendid irony, granted him books and night at a single touch. By the late 1950s he was the director of the Argentine…
- Victor HugoVictor Hugo died on the 22nd of May 1885, at 50 Avenue Victor Hugo in Paris. He was 83 years old, and he died of pneumonia. More than two million people joined his funeral procession from the Arc de Triomphe to the Panthéon, the largest…
- John MiltonJohn Milton sold the rights to one of the greatest poems in the English language for five pounds. On the 27th of April 1667, he handed Paradise Lost to the publisher Samuel Simmons, with a promise of five more pounds if the print run sold…
- Lev VygotskyLev Vygotsky died on the 11th of June 1934, at the age of 37, leaving behind a final notebook entry that read: "This is the final thing I have done in psychology - and I will like Moses, die at the summit, having glimpsed the promised land…
- Jean-Luc GodardJean-Luc Godard once said: "A film consists of a beginning, a middle and an end, though not necessarily in that order." That line, delivered with the offhand certainty of someone who had spent decades dismantling the very idea of…
- Claude Lévi-StraussClaude Lévi-Strauss died on the 30th of October 2009, at the age of 100, and for four days the world did not know. When French President Nicolas Sarkozy finally spoke, he called Lévi-Strauss "one of the greatest ethnologists of all time."…
- David AttenboroughDavid Attenborough turned 100 years old on the 8th of May 2026, and the Royal Albert Hall filled with singers, filmmakers, composers, and royalty to mark the occasion. King Charles III sent a birthday card. William, Prince of Wales,…