Curated category
People educated at Westminster School, London
- Andrew Lloyd WebberAndrew Lloyd Webber walked into Her Majesty's Theatre on the 11th of February 2012 to mark a milestone that no Broadway show had ever reached: the 10,000th…
- John GielgudOn the evening of the 20th of October 1953, John Gielgud was arrested in Chelsea for cruising for sex in a public lavatory, an act that was then a crime in…
- Ben JonsonBen Jonson killed a man in a field on the 22nd of September 1598 and walked away from the gallows by reciting a Bible verse.
- 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…
- John LockeJohn Locke composed his own obituary in Latin, and it begins with a command to a passerby. "Stay traveller: near this place lies JOHN LOCKE." The tablet, he…
- John Russell, 1st Earl RussellJohn Russell, 1st Earl Russell stood barely five feet five inches tall, and his political opponents never let him forget it.
- Kim PhilbyKim Philby died in Moscow on the 11th of May 1988, buried with the honours of a KGB General. His fourth wife, Rufina Ivanovna Pukhova, told a reporter that…
- Michael FlandersMichael Henry Flanders stood six feet three inches tall, was a fine oarsman and quarter-miler, and by the time he reached Oxford his contemporaries had no…
- Robert HookeRobert Hooke died in London on the 3rd of March 1703, alone in his room at Gresham College, blind and bedridden. When his belongings were searched, a chest…
- John DrydenJohn Dryden was attacked at around 8 pm on the 18th of December 1679, beaten by hired thugs in Rose Alley behind the Lamb and Flag pub in Covent Garden.
- Christopher WrenChristopher Wren looked down from the dome of St Paul's Cathedral and, according to a 19th-century legend, checked quietly on what he called "my greatest…
- Edward GibbonIt was on the night of the 27th of June 1787, between eleven and midnight, that Edward Gibbon wrote the last lines of his life's great work in a summer-house…
- Donald SwannDonald Ibrahim Swann was born on the 30th of September 1923 in Llanelli, Carmarthenshire, Wales, the son of a Russian doctor and a Turkmen-Russian nurse who…
- Robert SoutheyRobert Southey arrived at Balliol College, Oxford, carrying, by his own account, a head full of Rousseau and Werther and a heart full of poetry.
- Nicholas Rowe (writer)Nicholas Rowe died on the 6th of December 1718, and within a year the King of England had sent his widow a pension. Not as condolence, exactly. As payment.