The son of a white overseer and a village girl from the Jamaican uplands, raised in the slums of Kingston’s Trenchtown. With the Wailers he went from ska through rocksteady to reggae, and with “Catch a Fire” and “Exodus” reggae stopped being local music. Rasta gave his songs their language —...
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He was born in San Francisco while his performer parents were on tour, grew up in Hong Kong, acted in films as a child and fought on rooftops until his parents sent him back to America. There he studied philosophy, taught wing chun and devised jeet kune do — not a style but a refusal of styles:...
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She spent the war in occupied Holland: the hunger winter of 1944, tulip bulbs for food, secret ballet performances in aid of the resistance. A ballerina she never became — the years of malnutrition told — and she turned to acting. Her first big part, the princess in “Roman Holiday” (1953), won her...
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A childhood in London workhouses, a mother in an asylum, the music-hall stage from the age of five. He came to America on tour and stayed; in 1914 he invented the Tramp — bowler, cane, broken shoes — and two years later was the highest-paid man in the world. “The Kid”, “The Gold Rush”, “City...
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His parents gave him the name of an elder brother who had died nine months before and took him to the grave — Dalí counted this the first fact of his biography. He was expelled from the Madrid academy, joined the surrealist circle in Paris and devised the “paranoiac-critical method”: to paint...
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He could draw before he could speak and at sixteen was painting with academic perfection — the rest of his life was a departure from that skill. The blue period, the rose, “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon” of 1907, which broke the figure into planes, and cubism, worked out together with Braque. Then...
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The daughter of an artillery officer, married off at seventeen and gone within months; then twenty years of travelling of which little is firmly known, and which by her own account took in Egypt, India, Tibet and the teachers she called the Mahatmas. In 1875 in New York she founded the Theosophical
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A disciple of Sri Yukteswar, sent West by his teacher at twenty-seven for the congress of religions in Boston in 1920. He never went back: for thirty years he lectured across America to halls of thousands and founded the Self-Realization Fellowship with its centre in Los Angeles. He taught kriya...
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At sixteen the schoolboy Venkataraman was seized for no reason by the terror of imminent death, lay down on the floor and set about finding what in him would die and what would not. Within weeks he left home for Tiruvannamalai, to the hill of Arunachala, and did not leave it for fifty-four years,...
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His father sent him to England at seven and forbade him to learn any Indian language: the son was to come out an Englishman. He came out a Cambridge classicist, returned to India at twenty-one and within a few years was among the first to demand full independence rather than concessions. A...
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