Curated playlist
People educated at Westminster School, London
- Andrew Lloyd WebberAndrew Lloyd Webber's Phantom of the Opera closed on Broadway in 2023 after 13,981 performances.
- John GielgudJohn Gielgud was arrested months after being knighted. Backstage in Liverpool, he feared he could not face an audience.
- Ben JonsonBen Jonson killed a man in a duel and escaped hanging by reciting a Bible verse.
- A. A. MilneA. A. Milne accused his old cricket teammate P. G. Wodehouse of near treason.
- John LockeJohn Locke's phrase "long train of abuses" appears word for word in the Declaration of Independence.
- John Russell, 1st Earl RussellLord John Russell was barely five feet five, and cartoonists mocked him for it. He still reshaped British democracy.
- Kim PhilbyKim Philby lunched weekly with the CIA's counterintelligence chief while passing secrets to Moscow.
- Michael FlandersOxford refused Michael Flanders re-entry after polio left him in a wheelchair. He became a stage comedian instead.
- Robert HookeRobert Hooke built the air pump that made Boyle's Law possible. He also designed London's Monument to the Great Fire.
- Jeremy BenthamJeremy Bentham, the English philosopher, jurist and social reformer who lived from 1748 to 1832, is on public display at the entrance of the Student Centre at University College London. Visitors find a seated figure in a glass case,…
- John DrydenHired thugs beat poet John Dryden in a London alley in December 1679.
- Christopher WrenDays after the Great Fire of 1666, Christopher Wren drew a plan to rebuild all of London.
- Helena Bonham CarterHelena Bonham Carter applied to King's College, Cambridge, and the college said no. She was rejected "because officials were afraid that she would leave mid-term to pursue an acting career." The fear was well founded. Born in 1966, she…
- Edward GibbonEdward Gibbon said commanding militia grenadiers helped him understand the Roman legion.
- Donald SwannDonald Swann set J. R. R. Tolkien's poems to music, and Tolkien joined the recording.
- Robert SoutheyRobert Southey wrote the original story of Goldilocks and the Three Bears. He was also Poet Laureate for thirty years.
- Nicholas Rowe (writer)Nicholas Rowe made the first eighteenth-century edition of Shakespeare.