Narendranath Datta studied at a British college, read Spencer and Mill, and asked everyone he met whether they had seen God; only Ramakrishna answered — “yes, as I see you”. After his teacher’s death he walked India for years as a mendicant monk and then sailed for America. His address to the...
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An Albanian from Skopje who at eighteen entered an Irish order and was sent to teach in Calcutta. For eighteen years she taught geography to girls from well-off families, and in 1946, by her own account, heard “a call within a call” — to go to the poorest. Two years later she walked out of the...
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Karol Wojtyła lost his mother and brother early, worked under the German occupation in a quarry and a chemical plant, acted in an underground theatre and trained there, underground, for the priesthood. In 1978 the conclave elected him pope — the first non-Italian in four and a half centuries and...
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The son of a rich Irish family and a torpedo-boat commander in the Pacific whose boat was cut in two by a Japanese destroyer — he swam his crew out. At forty-three he became the youngest man elected president of the United States and the first Catholic in the office. His three years held the...
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A Baptist minister from Atlanta who at twenty-six led the Montgomery bus boycott — for more than a year the city’s black residents walked, and the Supreme Court struck down segregation on the buses. Then came the marches, the jails, the “Letter from Birmingham Jail” and the 1963 March on Washington
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She came to the throne at eighteen and reigned for sixty-three years, longer than any British monarch before Elizabeth II. An age is named after her: railways, steam, factories, the Great Exhibition of 1851 in the Crystal Palace, and an empire that by the end of her reign covered a quarter of the...
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A Corsican who spoke French with an accent, he finished artillery school and took Toulon at twenty-four. Then came Italy, Egypt, the coup of 18 Brumaire and the crown he placed on his own head in 1804. The Civil Code, the prefects, the Bank of France and the lycées outlived his rule and stand to...
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A Serb from a Croatian village who arrived in America with four cents and a letter of introduction to Edison. The two parted quickly: Edison stood for direct current, Tesla for alternating, which a transformer can step up and send hundreds of miles. The “war of the currents” ended in alternating...
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He dropped medicine, was being prepared for the church, and at twenty-two found himself aboard the Beagle as an unpaid ship’s naturalist. Five years of sailing gave him South America, the Galápagos with their finches and tortoises, and a chest of notes out of which everything else grew. He sketched
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A premature baby nobody expected to survive grew into the man who set the shape of physics for two hundred years. He sat out the plague years of 1665–1667 in the countryside and said later that this was when he devised the calculus, split white light into colours with a prism and first reckoned...
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