The son of a wealthy barrister, schooled at Harrow and Cambridge, he came home into the independence movement and spent nine years of his life in British prisons, where his books were written. Gandhi saw a political heir in him, though the two looked in different directions: Nehru wanted industry,...
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Olympic champion at eighteen, world heavyweight champion at twenty-two after the fight with Sonny Liston that nobody expected him to win. He announced at the same time that he had accepted Islam and was giving up the name Cassius Clay. In 1967 he refused to go to the war in Vietnam and lost the...
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He was born in a two-room house in Mississippi, sang in church and listened to the blues of black musicians on the radio. At nineteen he walked into the Sun studio in Memphis and cut “That’s All Right” — the 1954 record from which most listeners date rock and roll. Two years later came television,...
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She learned to fly at twenty-four, buying a second-hand biplane with money earned as a telephone operator and a photographer. In 1928 she was taken across the Atlantic as a passenger, and the fame felt unearned: in 1932 she flew the same ocean alone, fifteen hours from Newfoundland to a pasture in...
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At eighteen the bus she was riding collided with a tram: an iron handrail went through her pelvis and her spine was broken in three places. Thirty-odd operations followed, and corsets, and pain for the rest of her life. She began to paint lying in plaster with a mirror above the bed: of her hundred
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A cavalry officer and war correspondent, taken prisoner by the Boers and escaped; a minister in two parties in turn, answerable for the failure of the Dardanelles in 1915 and thrown out over it. Through the thirties he warned about Hitler almost alone, and in May 1940 took charge of a country left...
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The Swiss psychiatrist whom Freud at first took for his heir; after the break of 1913 he built a psychology of his own — the collective unconscious, the archetypes, introversion and extraversion (his words), individuation, synchronicity. The years after the break passed in a heavy inner crisis, out
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A Viennese neurologist who turned the treatment of hysteria into a theory of mental life: the unconscious, repression, the dream as the road to it, infantile sexuality, the ego and the id. “The Interpretation of Dreams” (1900) sold a few hundred copies a year at first and then reshaped the century...
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He failed as an art dealer, as a teacher and as a lay preacher among Belgian miners; he took up the brush at twenty-seven and had ten years in which to work. The dark Dutch painting gave way in Paris to the colour of the impressionists and in Arles to the light of the south — “Sunflowers”, “The...
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He was composing at five, and from the age of six his father took him round the courts of Europe — Munich, Vienna, Paris, London: the boy was shown off as a wonder and played with the keyboard covered by a cloth. By eighteen he had symphonies and operas behind him; by twenty-five, a post with the...
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