Curated playlist
Members of the Royal Academy of Science, Letters and Fine Arts of Belgium
- Benjamin BrittenBenjamin Britten was born on the 22nd of November 1913 in the fishing port of Lowestoft, Suffolk, and that birth date is no accident: it fell on the feast day of Saint Cecilia, the patron saint of music. By the time he died on the 4th of…
- James ChadwickIn February 1932, after only about two weeks at the laboratory bench, James Chadwick sent a letter to the journal Nature with a deliberately tentative title: "Possible Existence of a Neutron." Three months later, the hedging was gone. His…
- Charles DarwinCharles Robert Darwin once jotted his thoughts about marriage on two scraps of paper, drawing two columns headed "Marry" and "Not Marry". Under the case for marriage he wrote that a wife would be a "constant companion and a friend in old…
- Winston ChurchillWinston Churchill was born on the 30th of November 1874 inside Blenheim Palace, the ancestral home his family had held for generations in Oxfordshire. The building itself said something about who he was: a man descended from John…
- Salvador DalíSalvador Dalí was born on the 11th of May 1904, at 8:45 in the morning, in a house on Carrer Monturiol in the Catalan town of Figueres. He arrived into a family already shadowed by loss. His older brother, also named Salvador, had died…
- Marc ChagallMarc Chagall spent nearly a century alive on earth, and almost every one of those years was spent either fleeing something or painting it. Born Moishe Shagal in 1887 in a Jewish family near Vitebsk, in what is now Belarus, he died in 1985…
- Dmitri ShostakovichDmitri Shostakovich stood backstage at the Leningrad opera house on the 26th of January 1936, white as a sheet, waiting to take his bow. Joseph Stalin had just walked out of the auditorium without speaking to anyone. The next morning,…
- Svante ArrheniusSvante Arrhenius taught himself to read at age three, not because anyone encouraged him, but because he decided to. By watching his father add numbers in account books, he became an arithmetical prodigy before most children can tie their…
- Georges DumézilGeorges Dumézil was born in Paris on the 4th of March 1898, the son of a highly educated general in the French Army. By the time he died in the same city on the 11th of October 1986, he had published more than seventy-five books, mastered…
- Erwin PanofskyErwin Panofsky looked at a fifteenth-century Flemish painting of a man and a woman in a dim room and saw something no one else had seen: a legal contract. The year was 1934, and the painting was Jan van Eyck's Arnolfini Portrait. Panofsky…