Curated playlist
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 performance of The Phantom of the Opera. The run would continue for another decade…
- 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 Britain. He had been knighted only months earlier in the Coronation Honours. He was…
- 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. That single fact tells you almost everything about who he was: a man of extraordinary learning who lived at the…
- 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 made him famous were not the ones he cared most about writing. Alan Alexander Milne…
- 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 wrote, was a record that would quickly perish. The man it marked was an English…
- 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. Caricaturists made sport of his slight frame throughout a career that spanned four decades. Yet this small man…
- 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 he was "disillusioned with Communism by the end of his life, tortured by his…
- 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 doubt he would become the Olivier or Donat of his generation. His biographer and…
- 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 was found containing £8,000 in money and gold. His library held over 3,000 books in…
- 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. He had been walking home from Will's Coffee House, where London's literary wits…
- 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 work". The inscription carved into the floor of that cathedral, in a circle of black…
- 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 in his garden. He felt joy at recovering his freedom. Then a sober melancholy…
- 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 had both fled the Russian Revolution. His father's family traced its origins to a…
- 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. His religious convictions had already been rattled by Gibbon. He was eighteen, ambitious, and…
- 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. The pension came in recognition of Rowe's translation of Lucan, a verse paraphrase…