A left-handed guitarist who played a restrung right-handed instrument and made feedback, distortion and the howl of the amplifier part of the musical language. Three studio records in four years, Monterey and Woodstock — all of it fitted into a short span. He died in London on 18 September 1970,...
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The musician the Beatles began with, whose partnership with Paul McCartney produced the best-known song catalogue of the century. After the group broke up he made solo records, spoke against the war in Vietnam, and spent five years at home with his son releasing nothing. He was shot outside his New
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A writer who removed from prose everything it could stand to lose and left behind a short sentence that was imitated for half a century. The Sun Also Rises, A Farewell to Arms, For Whom the Bell Tolls and The Old Man and the Sea grew out of newspaper work and out of four wars he saw at close...
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A pianist whose playing threw European halls into a frenzy for which his contemporaries coined the word Lisztomania, and a composer who invented the symphonic poem. The solo piano recital in its present form is his invention: before him no one dared give a whole programme to a single performer. At...
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A poet, dramatist and naturalist whose Faust was written over sixty years and finished a year before his death. The Sorrows of Young Werther made him famous at twenty-five and set off a wave of imitation across Europe. For half a century he served at the Weimar court, occupying himself with mining,
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A mathematician whose 1936 paper described an abstract machine from which the notion of computability and the whole theory of algorithms grew. During the war he worked at Bletchley Park on German ciphers: his bombe broke Enigma and, by later estimates, shortened the war by years. Afterwards he...
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A composer who wrote almost everything for a single instrument and changed its language: etudes, nocturnes, ballades, mazurkas and polonaises. From the age of twenty he lived in Paris, having left Poland for good after the rising of 1830 was put down; he taught and played in salons, giving public...
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A philosopher and philologist who became a professor at Basel at twenty-four and left the chair through illness at thirty-four. Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Beyond Good and Evil and On the Genealogy of Morals were written across a decade of near-complete solitude, between migraines and removals. In...
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A painter, engineer and naturalist for whom drawing was a way of thinking. The Last Supper and the Mona Lisa changed painting, while the thousands of pages of his notebooks — anatomy, water, flight, the working of machines — stayed almost unknown to his contemporaries and were read through only...
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An astronomer and mathematician who replaced the circles of ancient astronomy with the ellipse: a planet travels around the Sun on a stretched curve with the Sun at one focus. The three laws that bear his name turned celestial mechanics from description into calculation and later underpinned...
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