Singer and co-writer for the Rolling Stones, the longest-running band in rock; the way of holding a stage that he introduced spread across popular music. He studied at the London School of Economics and left it for music. Born in Dartford, Kent, on 26 July 1943 at 02:30 British Double Summer Time...
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A musician whose partnership with John Lennon produced the most performed song catalogue of the century; Yesterday has been covered more than two thousand times. After the group broke up he formed Wings and has gone on performing into a sixth decade. Born in Liverpool on 18 June 1942 at 14:00...
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A musician for whom changing appearance was a working method: Ziggy Stardust, Aladdin Sane, the Thin White Duke — each record arrived with a new face and a new sound. The Berlin trilogy of the late seventies altered what popular music could be; he released his last album two days before his death...
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A songwriter who drew out of the folk tradition a lyric of such density that in 2016 he was given the Nobel Prize in Literature — the first songwriter to take it. In 1965 he walked onto the Newport folk festival stage with an electric guitar and was booed, splitting his audience in two. Born in...
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An artist who made a soup tin, a cola bottle and a film star's face the subject of art, and called his studio the Factory — where silkscreens were printed in runs, like goods. In 1968 he was badly wounded by a shot from Valerie Solanas and wore a surgical corset for the rest of his life. Born in...
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A writer whose Ulysses describes one Dublin day, 16 June 1904, and works through the whole history of English prose in doing so; the book was banned as obscene in the United States for seven years. His last seventeen years went to Finnegans Wake, written in a language that does not exist. Born in...
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A physicist who at twenty-three built matrix mechanics — the first consistent form of quantum theory — and two years later derived the uncertainty principle: the position and momentum of a particle cannot both be known exactly. He took the Nobel Prize at thirty-one; during the war he led the German
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An inventor with one thousand and ninety-three American patents to his name: the phonograph, a working incandescent lamp, the kinetoscope, a system for lighting cities. He devised not only things but a way of devising them — the industrial laboratory at Menlo Park, where invention first became an...
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A chemist and microbiologist who disproved spontaneous generation by experiment and showed that fermentation and spoilage are caused by living organisms; from this came pasteurisation and the whole of surgical asepsis. He developed vaccines against anthrax and rabies, first trying the latter on a...
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An astronomer and physicist, the first to turn a telescope on the sky: the moons of Jupiter, the phases of Venus and mountains on the Moon destroyed the idea of unchanging heavens. His defence of the Copernican system brought him before the Inquisition in 1633, to recantation and to house arrest...
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