Thinkers Timeline

Jeremy Bentham was an English philosopher and legal reformer. He was the founder of modern utilitarianism. He was born on 15 February 1748 in London, into a wealthy lawyer's family. He was a child prodigy. He started learning Latin at age three and entered Oxford University at twelve. He qualified as a lawyer but never practised law. He thought the English legal system was a mess of confused rules that harmed the people it was meant to serve. He spent the rest of his life trying to reform it. He inherited enough money to live without working. For nearly 60 years, he wrote almost every day. He produced thousands of pages on law, government, punishment, economics, and ethics. Much of his work was not published during his lifetime. He would start a book, follow his thoughts into new topics, and leave the book unfinished. His friends and disciples, including James Mill and later James's son John Stuart Mill, edited and published large parts of his work. Bentham's main book, An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation, appeared in 1789. It set out his core principle: the measure of a good action or a good law is whether it produces the greatest happiness for the greatest number of people. This principle, called the 'principle of utility', became the foundation of utilitarianism. His influence on law and politics in Britain was enormous. He helped design prisons, wrote model constitutions for foreign governments, and shaped the reform movements of the early 19th century. He had unusual ideas. He designed a new kind of prison, the Panopticon, that has since become a famous image of surveillance. He argued against laws punishing homosexual acts, centuries before this became widely accepted. He left instructions for his body to be preserved after death and displayed in a wooden cabinet. His preserved body, called the 'auto-icon', is still on display at University College London, which he helped inspire. He died on 6 June 1832 in London, aged 84.

Mary Shelley (1797-1851) was an English novelist whose Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus, written when she was eighteen years old, is widely regarded as the founding work of science fiction and one of the most influential novels in the English language. She was born in London to William Godwin, the political philosopher, and Mary Wollstonecraft, the author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. Her mother died days after giving birth to her, and Mary grew up in a household filled with books and visitors from the radical circles of her father. At sixteen she eloped with the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley. In the summer of 1816, during a cold and rainy holiday at the Villa Diodati on Lake Geneva, Lord Byron proposed that each member of their company write a ghost story. Over the following months Mary wrote Frankenstein, published in 1818. Her life was marked by loss: three of her four children died in infancy or childhood, her husband drowned in 1822, and she was left at twenty-four to raise her surviving son alone and to support herself by writing. She produced further novels, including The Last Man, a post-apocalyptic narrative written after Percy's death, as well as travel writing, short stories, biographical essays, and careful editions of her husband's poetry. She died of a brain tumour in 1851, aged fifty-three.

Mary Anning (1799-1847) was an English fossil collector and self-taught palaeontologist whose discoveries on the cliffs of Lyme Regis in Dorset transformed scientific understanding of the deep past. She was born into a poor Dissenting Protestant family that made part of its living by selling curiosities — fossils and shells — to summer visitors on the south coast of England. Her father Richard taught her and her brother Joseph how to find fossils in the crumbling cliffs of the Blue Lias. He died when she was eleven, leaving the family in debt. Mary took up fossil hunting as a trade to support her mother and brother. At about twelve, she and Joseph uncovered the first complete ichthyosaur skeleton known to science, a marine reptile that had been unknown before. Over the following decades Mary made many further extraordinary finds on her own: the first complete plesiosaur, the first British pterosaur outside the usual fossil record, important ichthyosaurs, and fossil fish with preserved ink sacs. She learned enough anatomy, geology, and classical languages to read the scientific papers written about her finds — and to correct them. The gentlemen geologists who bought her specimens and published descriptions of them sometimes credited her by name and sometimes did not. She died of breast cancer at forty-seven, still poor despite the scientific importance of what she had found.

Harriet Martineau was an English writer and social theorist. Many scholars now call her the first woman sociologist. She was born on 12 June 1802 in Norwich, England. Her family were Unitarians, a religious group that valued education for girls and liberal ideas. She was the sixth of eight children. From around the age of twelve she began to lose her hearing. By her twenties she was almost completely deaf. She used an ear trumpet (a kind of early hearing aid) for the rest of her life. Her father's cloth business failed before he died in 1826. The family lost most of its money. Most women of her class would have become governesses or wives. Martineau's deafness made teaching hard. She chose to write for a living instead. She succeeded. By the 1830s she was one of the most famous writers in Britain. In 1832-34 she published Illustrations of Political Economy. This was twenty-five short story books that taught economic ideas to ordinary readers. The series sold hugely. Queen Victoria invited her to her coronation in 1838. In 1834-36 she travelled around the United States. She met abolitionists, attended anti-slavery meetings, and wrote Society in America (1837). This book made her enemies in the American South. She kept writing for forty more years. She produced sociology, history, novels, children's books, travel writing, and around 1,600 newspaper articles. She died on 27 June 1876, aged 74, at her home in the English Lake District. Her Autobiography was published the next year.

Charles Darwin (1809-1882) was an English naturalist and biologist. He was born in Shrewsbury into a wealthy and intellectually distinguished family: his grandfather Erasmus Darwin had written about the idea of species transforming over time. He studied medicine in Edinburgh and then theology at Cambridge, but his real passion was natural history. In 1831, at the age of twenty-two, he joined the voyage of HMS Beagle as the ship's naturalist on a five-year journey around the world. What he observed on that voyage, particularly the variation among species on the Galapagos Islands, planted the seeds of his great theory. He spent the following twenty years accumulating evidence and working out his ideas before publishing On the Origin of Species in 1859. He knew the book would be controversial and he was right: it transformed not only biology but how human beings understood themselves and their place in the natural world. He spent the rest of his life at his home in Kent, continuing to work on natural history, corresponding with scientists worldwide, and quietly revolutionising biology from his study and garden. He died in 1882 and was buried in Westminster Abbey.

Augusta Ada King, Countess of Lovelace (1815-1852), usually known as Ada Lovelace, was an English mathematician widely regarded as the author of the first published algorithm intended to be run on a machine. She was the only legitimate child of the poet Lord Byron and Annabella Milbanke, a mathematically inclined aristocrat who separated from Byron a month after Ada's birth. Annabella worried that her daughter might inherit her father's volatility and insisted that Ada be given a rigorous education in mathematics and science — unusual for a girl of her class at the time. Ada studied with tutors including the mathematician Augustus De Morgan and the scientist Mary Somerville. In 1833, at seventeen, she met Charles Babbage, the mathematician designing mechanical calculating machines. She became his close intellectual collaborator over the next two decades. In 1843 she translated an article on Babbage's proposed Analytical Engine from French, adding her own extensive notes that more than tripled the length of the original. These notes, published under her initials AAL, contain the first detailed algorithm designed for machine execution and a remarkable philosophical discussion of what such a machine could and could not do. She married William King, later Earl of Lovelace, and had three children. She died of uterine cancer at thirty-six, having published only the one major work but having thought further into the future of computing than almost anyone of her century.

Karl Marx (1818-1883) was a German economist, philosopher, historian, and political thinker whose ideas have shaped the modern world more than almost any other thinker of his century. He was born in Trier, in what was then the Prussian Rhineland. His family was Jewish — both his grandfathers had been rabbis — but his father had converted to Lutheran Christianity to be allowed to practise law. Marx grew up in a comfortable middle-class home with a good education. He studied law at the University of Bonn and then philosophy at Berlin, where he was deeply influenced by the philosophy of Hegel. He completed his doctorate in 1841. He could not become a university professor because of his radical views, so he turned to journalism. As editor of a Rhineland newspaper, he began writing on political and economic questions. The Prussian authorities soon shut the paper down. In 1843 he married his childhood sweetheart Jenny von Westphalen and moved to Paris, where he met Friedrich Engels in 1844. The two men would remain close friends and intellectual partners for the rest of Marx's life. Engels, whose family owned textile factories, gave Marx direct knowledge of industrial conditions and later supported him financially for many years. In 1848 Marx and Engels published The Communist Manifesto. Revolutions broke out across Europe that same year. Marx was expelled from several countries before settling in London in 1849. He lived there for the rest of his life, working in the British Museum reading room and writing his great book Capital — the first volume of which was published in 1867. He worked in great poverty for much of this period, losing several children to the diseases of poverty and depending heavily on Engels's financial help. He helped found the International Working Men's Association in 1864, which brought together socialists and labour activists from many countries. He died in London in 1883 at the age of sixty-four. Engels edited and published the remaining volumes of Capital after his death. Marx's influence has been enormous and contested. Movements calling themselves Marxist transformed whole societies in the twentieth century, with results both remarkable and, in some cases, catastrophic. His work itself remains a reference point for anyone trying to understand capitalism, class, and modern history.

Florence Nightingale (1820-1910) was a British nurse, statistician, and public health reformer. She was born into a wealthy English family and received an unusually thorough education for a woman of her time. Against fierce opposition from her family, who expected her to marry and manage a household, she pursued nursing, which was then a low-status occupation associated with poor and uneducated women. In 1854, during the Crimean War, she was sent with a team of nurses to the British military hospital at Scutari in present-day Istanbul, where she found conditions of horrifying neglect: thousands of soldiers were dying not from their wounds but from infectious diseases caused by overcrowding, poor sanitation, inadequate ventilation, and contaminated water. Over the following months she organised the care of the hospital, improved sanitation, and gathered careful data on the causes of death. After the war she spent the rest of her life, largely working from a sickbed due to a chronic illness she contracted in the Crimea, transforming nursing, hospital design, and public health through evidence-based argument and systematic use of statistics. She died in 1910 aged ninety.

Dame Millicent Garrett Fawcett was an English political activist and writer. She led the largest peaceful campaign for British women's right to vote for over twenty years. She was born on 11 June 1847 in Aldeburgh, a small town on the coast of Suffolk, England. Her father, Newson Garrett, was a successful businessman and political radical. He believed strongly in education for his daughters, which was unusual at the time. The Garrett family produced several remarkable women. Millicent's older sister Elizabeth Garrett Anderson became Britain's first qualified woman doctor. Their cousin Rhoda Garrett was a pioneer interior designer. Millicent herself married Henry Fawcett in 1867, when she was 19. He was a politician, professor of political economy at Cambridge, and blind from a shooting accident. They were intellectual partners. Their daughter Philippa later became one of the first women to score top marks in mathematics at Cambridge. Millicent's interest in women's right to vote (called 'suffrage') began very early. She attended her first suffrage meeting at age 19 in 1866, after hearing the philosopher John Stuart Mill speak on women's equality. She became active in campaigns at once. When her husband died in 1884, Millicent was 38. She turned her grief into political work. In 1897 she became leader of the National Union of Women's Suffrage Societies (NUWSS), Britain's largest peaceful suffrage organisation. She led it for 22 years. In 1918, when British women over 30 finally won the vote, she was 71. In 1928, full equal voting rights for women were achieved. She died the next year, on 5 August 1929, aged 82.

Virginia Woolf was an English novelist, essayist, and literary critic. She is one of the most important writers of the 20th century. She was born Adeline Virginia Stephen on 25 January 1882 in London. Her father, Leslie Stephen, was a famous editor and critic. Her mother, Julia, was a model for pre-Raphaelite painters. The household was full of books and writers. It was also full of suffering. Virginia's mother died when she was 13. Her half-sister died two years later. Her father died when she was 22. She had her first serious mental breakdown after each of these losses. She was taught at home. Unlike her brothers, she was not sent to school or university. She later wrote sharply about this unequal education. She read everything in her father's library. She began writing as a young woman. After her father's death, she moved with her siblings to the Bloomsbury area of London. There she was part of a circle of writers, artists, and thinkers known as the Bloomsbury Group. They believed in honest talk, personal freedom, and taking art seriously. In 1912, she married Leonard Woolf, a writer and political thinker. Together, in 1917, they founded the Hogarth Press, which published her own books and those of other important writers, including T.S. Eliot and translations of Freud. Her major novels appeared between the two world wars: Mrs Dalloway (1925), To the Lighthouse (1927), Orlando (1928), The Waves (1931), and Between the Acts (1941). She also wrote important essays: A Room of One's Own (1929) and Three Guineas (1938). She suffered from serious mental illness throughout her life. Her letters and diaries describe periods of depression and what was then called 'madness'. As the Second World War threatened England, and with Germany bombing London, her mental state worsened. On 28 March 1941, she filled her coat pockets with stones and walked into the River Ouse near her home in Sussex. She was 59. Her suicide note to Leonard said she could not face another breakdown.

John Maynard Keynes (1883–1946) was a British economist whose ideas changed the way governments manage their economies. He grew up in Cambridge, England, studied mathematics and philosophy, and became one of the most influential thinkers of the 20th century. He worked as a civil servant, an academic, a journalist, and an adviser to the British government during two world wars. His most important book, The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, published in 1936, argued that governments should actively manage their economies rather than leaving everything to the market. His ideas shaped the economic policies of most democratic countries for decades after the Second World War and remain central to economic debate today.

T.S. Eliot was a poet and critic. His full name was Thomas Stearns Eliot. He is seen as one of the most important poets in English of the twentieth century. He was born in 1888 in St Louis, in the United States. He died in 1965 in London. Eliot came from a well-off American family. He studied at Harvard University and then in Europe. As a young man he settled in England, and he later became a British citizen. He spent the rest of his life there. Eliot did not begin as a full-time writer. For years he worked at a bank in London, writing poetry in his spare time. Later he became an editor at a publishing house, where he helped many other writers. His most famous poem is 'The Waste Land', published in 1922. It is a difficult, broken poem about a damaged world after the First World War. It made him famous. Later he wrote 'Four Quartets', a long, calmer poem about time and faith. Eliot also wrote important essays about poetry. In 1948 he won the Nobel Prize in Literature. His first marriage was very unhappy and painful for both people. In his later years he found more peace, partly through his religious faith and a happy second marriage.

Ludwig Wittgenstein was an Austrian-British philosopher. Many consider him the greatest philosopher of the twentieth century. He was born on 26 April 1889 in Vienna, Austria, into one of the wealthiest families in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. His father was a powerful steel industrialist. His mother was a gifted musician. The family home was visited by composers like Brahms and Mahler. Three of his brothers died by suicide. Ludwig was first trained as an engineer in Berlin and Manchester, where he worked on aeroplane design. While studying, he became fascinated by the foundations of mathematics. In 1911 he travelled to Cambridge to work with the philosopher Bertrand Russell, who quickly recognised his genius. When the First World War broke out in 1914, Wittgenstein volunteered for the Austro-Hungarian army. He fought bravely and was decorated. While at the front and in a prisoner-of-war camp, he wrote his first book. That book, the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, was published in 1921. He believed it had solved all the major problems of philosophy. He gave away his vast inherited fortune and became a primary school teacher in remote Austrian villages. He also designed an austere house for his sister in Vienna. In 1929 he returned to Cambridge, having decided his earlier work contained serious mistakes. He spent the rest of his life developing a very different philosophy. He served as a hospital porter during the Second World War. He died of prostate cancer in Cambridge on 29 April 1951, aged 62. His last words to his housekeeper were: 'Tell them I've had a wonderful life.'

Karl Popper was an Austrian-British philosopher of science and politics. He was born in 1902 in Vienna into a well-off, secular Jewish family that had converted to Lutheran Christianity. His parents loved books, and Popper grew up reading widely. As a young man he tried out many of the big intellectual movements of his time. He attended Marxist meetings, studied Freudian psychology, and worked briefly with the Adlerian school of psychology. He was struck by something that bothered him for the rest of his life. The followers of these movements seemed able to explain everything. Whatever happened in the world, Marxism, Freudianism, and Adlerian theory could fit it into their system. Popper began to wonder whether this was a strength or a weakness. He trained as a teacher and earned a doctorate in philosophy from the University of Vienna in 1928. In 1934 he published his first major book, Logic of Scientific Discovery, which made his name in philosophy of science. As Hitler rose to power, Popper, with his Jewish background, knew he had to leave Europe. In 1937 he took a teaching post in New Zealand. There, during the Second World War, he wrote The Open Society and Its Enemies, his great defence of liberal democracy. In 1946 he moved to the London School of Economics, where he stayed for the rest of his career. He was knighted in 1965. He wrote on philosophy of science, politics, the mind, and many other subjects. He died in 1994 in London at the age of 92.

George Orwell was the pen name of Eric Arthur Blair, an English writer, journalist, and essayist. He is one of the most quoted writers of the 20th century. He was born on 25 June 1903 in Motihari, in the Bengal region of British India. His father worked for the British colonial government. His mother brought him back to England when he was a small child. He grew up in modest circumstances in what he later called the 'lower-upper-middle class'. He won scholarships to good English schools, ending up at Eton, one of the most elite schools in the country. He did not do well there academically. Instead of going to university, in 1922 he sailed to Burma (now Myanmar) and joined the Indian Imperial Police. He served for five years. What he saw changed his life. He watched British officers beat and humiliate Burmese people. He took part in colonial rule himself. He came to hate it. In 1927, he left the police, returned to England, and began writing. For years he was poor. He lived with tramps in London, washed dishes in Paris, picked hops in Kent, and taught in small schools. This experience became the material for his first books, Down and Out in Paris and London (1933) and The Road to Wigan Pier (1937). In 1936, he went to Spain to fight against the fascist forces in the Spanish Civil War. He was shot in the throat by a sniper. His account of the war, Homage to Catalonia (1938), is one of the great books of 20th-century political writing. He spent the Second World War in London, working for the BBC and writing. His two most famous books came in his last years. Animal Farm (1945) was a satire on the Soviet Union. Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) was a novel about totalitarian rule. He had tuberculosis throughout these years. He died in London on 21 January 1950, aged 46, soon after finishing Nineteen Eighty-Four.

Joan Robinson was a British economist. She was one of the most important economists of the 20th century. Many people think she should have won the Nobel Prize in Economics. She never did, almost certainly because she was a woman and because her views were politically uncomfortable. She was born in 1903 in Camberley, Surrey, in southern England. Her birth name was Joan Maurice. She came from an upper-middle-class family. Her father was a soldier and her mother was the daughter of a famous classics professor. Joan studied economics at Cambridge from 1922. The university had only recently begun allowing women to take degree examinations. She married another young economist, Austin Robinson, in 1926. They had two daughters. She became part of the famous group of Cambridge economists around John Maynard Keynes. Keynes was working out his revolutionary new theory of how economies actually work. Joan was one of his closest collaborators. She helped develop his ideas. She also did major original work of her own. Her 1933 book The Economics of Imperfect Competition introduced ideas that became standard in economics. She taught at Cambridge for over 50 years. She was finally promoted to a full professorship in 1965, much later than she should have been. She was sharp, sometimes difficult, and often controversial. She visited China multiple times during the Cultural Revolution and wrote about it more positively than later events would justify. She also visited North Korea and admired aspects of its economy. Some of these political judgements have aged badly. She remained intellectually active until shortly before her death in 1983.

Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin was an English chemist. She remains the only British woman ever to win a Nobel Prize in any of the sciences. She was born on 12 May 1910 in Cairo, Egypt, where her father worked for the British colonial education service. The family later moved to Sudan. As a young child, Dorothy and her sisters were sent to live with relatives in England while her parents stayed in North Africa. She loved crystals from age ten, when she made her first crystals from chemistry kits. She was one of only two girls allowed to study chemistry at her school in Suffolk, where the subject was thought to be for boys. She studied chemistry at Somerville College, Oxford, from 1928 to 1932. She then went to Cambridge for her PhD with the crystallographer J. D. Bernal. In her mid-twenties she developed serious rheumatoid arthritis, which would deform her hands and feet for the rest of her life. She kept working anyway. She returned to Oxford in 1934 and worked there for the rest of her career. In 1937 she married Thomas Hodgkin, a historian who became an authority on African history. They had three children. She spent decades working out the three-dimensional structures of complicated biological molecules using X-ray crystallography. She solved the structure of penicillin in 1945, vitamin B12 in 1955, and finally insulin in 1969, after working on it for thirty-four years. She won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1964. She died on 29 July 1994, aged 84.

Alan Turing was an English mathematician, codebreaker, and founder of modern computer science. He was born in London on 23 June 1912. His father worked in the Indian Civil Service, which meant Turing's parents spent much of his childhood abroad. He and his older brother were often raised by foster families in England. As a boy he was shy, odd, and brilliant at mathematics. He studied at King's College, Cambridge, and then earned a PhD at Princeton in 1938. In 1936, while still a student, he wrote a paper called On Computable Numbers. It described an imaginary machine that could follow simple rules to perform any calculation. This imaginary machine, now called a Turing machine, became the theoretical foundation of every modern computer. When the Second World War began in September 1939, Turing joined the British codebreaking centre at Bletchley Park. He helped design a machine called the Bombe, used to break the German Enigma code. His work is thought to have shortened the war by years. He was awarded the OBE in 1945. After the war, Turing worked on building real computers in London and Manchester. In 1950 he proposed the Turing test, a way of asking whether a computer could think. He also began work on mathematical biology. In 1952, Turing was prosecuted for being gay, which was then illegal in Britain. He was forced to take hormone treatment as punishment. He died on 7 June 1954, aged 41, from cyanide poisoning. His death was ruled a suicide. In 2013 he received a formal royal pardon.

Eric Hobsbawm was a British historian and one of the most influential historians of the 20th century. He wrote about the rise of capitalism, the development of the modern world, and the major political movements of the 19th and 20th centuries. He was a lifelong Marxist and Communist Party member. His writing was clear, ambitious, and read by both academics and general audiences. He was born in Alexandria, Egypt, in 1917. He died in London in 2012, aged 95. He came from a Jewish family. His father was British. His mother was Austrian. He was born in Alexandria where his father worked. The family moved to Vienna, then to Berlin. Both his parents died young. He was orphaned by 14. An aunt brought him to England in 1933, the year Hitler came to power in Germany. His timing was lucky. The move to England saved his life. Most of his Central European Jewish family who stayed behind were eventually killed in the Holocaust. He studied history at Cambridge from 1936. He joined the Communist Party as a young man and remained a member for the rest of his life, despite the party's decline and the revelations of Stalin's crimes. He served in the British army during the Second World War. After the war, he became a lecturer at Birkbeck College, University of London, where he taught for over 50 years. He wrote many books. His most famous are the four-volume series on the modern world: The Age of Revolution (1962), The Age of Capital (1975), The Age of Empire (1987), and The Age of Extremes (1994). Together these books cover European and world history from 1789 to 1991. He also wrote on bandits, on jazz, on nationalism, and on many other subjects. His autobiography Interesting Times came out in 2002. He continued writing into his nineties.

Gertrude Elizabeth Margaret Anscombe was a British philosopher. She was one of the most important philosophers writing in English in the 20th century. She was born on 18 March 1919 in Limerick, Ireland, where her father was stationed with the British Army. The family moved back to England soon after. She studied at Sydenham School in south London and then at St Hugh's College, Oxford, from 1937 to 1941. At Oxford she earned the highest degree in classics and philosophy. As a teenager, she read herself into Catholicism and converted, against her Anglican family's wishes. She remained a devout Catholic for the rest of her life. Her religion shaped her philosophy but did not limit it. She was also ferociously independent. As an Oxford undergraduate in 1939, she co-wrote a pamphlet arguing that Britain's entry into the Second World War was not justified. She kept this position even as most of her country and family disagreed. In 1942 she moved to Cambridge to study with Ludwig Wittgenstein, one of the most important philosophers of the 20th century. He became her teacher and friend. She was one of very few students he trusted. When he died in 1951, he named her as one of his three literary executors. She translated his major work, Philosophical Investigations, from German into English in 1953. This translation became the standard English version and is still read today. She married the philosopher Peter Geach in 1941. They had seven children. She held positions at Oxford for almost twenty years, then moved to Cambridge in 1970 to take the chair in philosophy once held by Wittgenstein. She was a striking figure: she wore trousers and men's clothes in an era when this was unusual, smoked cigars, and did not take her husband's name. She died in Cambridge on 5 January 2001, aged 81.

Iris Murdoch was an Irish-British philosopher and novelist. She is one of the most important moral philosophers of the 20th century. She was also one of the most successful British novelists of her time. She published 26 novels alongside her philosophical work. She was born in 1919 in Dublin, Ireland. Her family moved to London when she was very young. She studied classics and ancient philosophy at Oxford from 1938. The Second World War interrupted her studies. She worked for the British Treasury and then for the United Nations relief agency in displaced persons camps in Europe after the war. She saw the human consequences of the war directly. The experience shaped her later thinking about moral life. In 1948 she became a philosophy fellow at St Anne's College, Oxford. She taught there for many years. In 1956 she married John Bayley, a literary critic. The marriage lasted until her death and was unconventional in many ways. She had several intense relationships with both men and women throughout her life, often while married. Her first novel, Under the Net, came out in 1954. The book was successful. She continued writing novels alongside philosophy for the rest of her career. Her novels are full of complicated relationships, moral struggles, and sudden surprising events. Some readers love them. Some find them odd. Her philosophical books include The Sovereignty of Good, one of the most loved short books in 20th-century moral philosophy. In the early 1990s, she developed Alzheimer's disease. The illness slowly destroyed her ability to think and write. She died in 1999, aged 79. Her husband John Bayley wrote a famous memoir about her decline.

Mary Midgley was a British moral philosopher. She is one of the most original ethical thinkers of the 20th century. She is best known for her work on animals, evolution, science, and what makes humans morally serious. She wrote in plain language for general readers as well as academic ones. She was born in 1919 in London. She died in 2018, aged 99. She was active and writing books well into her 90s. She studied classics and philosophy at Oxford from 1938. She belonged to a remarkable generation of women philosophers there, including Iris Murdoch, Elizabeth Anscombe, and Philippa Foot. They all attended Oxford during the Second World War, when many male students had been called away. The reduced male presence created an unusual opportunity. Together these four women, sometimes called the Oxford Quartet, would later help reshape Anglo-American moral philosophy. After Oxford, Midgley married the philosopher Geoffrey Midgley in 1950. They moved to Newcastle in northern England, where Geoffrey took a teaching post. Mary raised three sons. She did not publish her first book until she was 59. Beast and Man came out in 1978. The book was a major statement on the relationship between human beings and other animals. It launched her late and remarkable writing career. From 1978 until her death 40 years later, she wrote book after book. She criticised what she saw as scientific over-reach by figures like Richard Dawkins. She wrote about ethics, religion, evolution, and the role of myth in scientific thinking. She became known as a sharp, clear, plain-spoken critic of bad ideas. She finished her last book just months before her death at 99.

Rosalind Franklin (1920-1958) was a British chemist and X-ray crystallographer. She was born in London into a prominent Jewish family and showed exceptional scientific ability from childhood. She studied chemistry at Cambridge University and then worked in Paris, where she became expert in X-ray crystallography: a technique that uses X-rays to determine the three-dimensional structure of molecules. She returned to England in 1951 to work at King's College London, where she was assigned to study the structure of DNA. Working with extraordinary precision, she produced some of the clearest X-ray photographs of DNA ever taken, including the famous Photo 51, which showed clear evidence of the double-helix structure. This photograph was shown to James Watson without her knowledge or permission by her colleague Maurice Wilkins. Watson and Francis Crick, who also had access to Franklin's unpublished data through other channels, used this information to build their model of DNA. Their paper announcing the double-helix structure was published in Nature in April 1953. Franklin was not credited as a contributor. She went on to do brilliant work on the structure of viruses at Birkbeck College before dying of ovarian cancer in 1958 at the age of thirty-seven. Watson, Crick, and Wilkins received the Nobel Prize for the discovery of DNA's structure in 1962.

E.P. Thompson (1924-1993) was a British historian, socialist activist, and peace campaigner. His full name was Edward Palmer Thompson. He was born in Oxford into a family with strong connections to India: his father had been a Methodist missionary and a friend of Rabindranath Tagore, and Thompson grew up with an internationalist outlook. He studied at Cambridge, served in the Second World War in Italy, and then worked as an adult education tutor for the Workers Educational Association in Yorkshire, teaching history to working-class communities. This experience of teaching history to people whose own ancestors rarely appeared in it profoundly shaped his work. He left the Communist Party of Great Britain in 1956 following the Soviet invasion of Hungary and became one of the founders of the New Left in Britain. His monumental work The Making of the English Working Class, published in 1963, transformed how historians thought about their subject. He was also a leading figure in the European Nuclear Disarmament movement in the 1980s. He died in 1993.

Stuart McPhail Hall was a Jamaican-born British sociologist and cultural theorist. He is one of the founding figures of cultural studies. He was born on 3 February 1932 in Kingston, Jamaica. His family was middle class and mixed race. His parents wanted him to identify as British rather than Jamaican or Black. This early pressure shaped his lifelong interest in identity. In 1951, at nineteen, he won a Rhodes Scholarship to Oxford University. He travelled to England and never moved back to live in Jamaica. He later described arriving in Britain as becoming a 'familiar stranger'. He knew the language and the books. But the country did not know him. This in-between position gave him his unique way of seeing things. He studied literature at Oxford but grew bored with traditional academic work. In the 1950s he helped found the New Left Review. This was a journal for socialist thinkers who rejected both Soviet communism and old British Labour politics. In 1964 he joined the new Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at the University of Birmingham. He became its director in 1968. For the next ten years, he turned it into the most important cultural studies centre in the world. In 1979 he moved to the Open University, which taught mostly through TV and correspondence. He wanted to reach ordinary people, not just university students. He stayed there until he retired. He died on 10 February 2014, aged 82. He had suffered from kidney failure for many years.

Amartya Sen (born 1933) is an Indian economist and philosopher. He was born in West Bengal, India, and grew up during a period of great upheaval: as a child he witnessed the Bengal famine of 1943, in which around three million people died of hunger. This experience shaped his life's work. He studied economics in India and then at Cambridge University in England, where he later became a professor. He has also taught at Harvard University in the United States, where he has spent much of his career. In 1998 he received the Nobel Prize in Economics for his work on welfare economics, poverty, and inequality. He is best known outside economics for two connected contributions: the capabilities approach, a new way of measuring human development and wellbeing, and his analysis of famine, which showed that famines are not caused by a shortage of food but by political failures that leave some people unable to afford the food that exists. He has also written important books on democracy, justice, identity, and the relationship between freedom and development.

Henry Widdowson is a British linguist. A linguist is someone who studies language in a scientific way. Widdowson was born in 1935. He became one of the most important thinkers in a field called applied linguistics. Applied linguistics is the study of real-world language problems. The biggest of these problems is how people learn and teach languages. Widdowson spent his career thinking carefully about this. He studied at the University of Cambridge and later at the University of Edinburgh. He then taught at the University of London and at the University of Essex. He also worked for the British Council, an organisation that helps spread English teaching around the world. Later he worked in Vienna, Austria. Widdowson wrote many books and articles. His most famous book is 'Teaching Language as Communication', published in 1978. It changed how many people thought about language teaching. Widdowson is known for being a deep and careful thinker. He often questioned popular ideas in his field. He did not just accept new teaching methods because they were fashionable. He asked hard questions about whether they really made sense. Because of this, he is sometimes called the conscience of applied linguistics. He pushed the field to think clearly. He is still active as a writer and speaker.

David Crystal is a British linguist. A linguist is a person who studies language in a careful, scientific way. Crystal was born in 1941 in Lisburn, Northern Ireland. He spent part of his childhood in Wales, and Wales is still his home today. Crystal studied English at University College London. He then worked as a university lecturer, first at Bangor and then at Reading, where he became a professor. In 1984 he left full-time university work. Since then he has worked as an independent writer, editor, and broadcaster. Crystal is famous for one main reason. He has written or edited more than one hundred books about language. Many of these are for ordinary readers, not only for experts. He wrote two large reference books, 'The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language' and 'The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language'. He has also written about how English spread around the world, about languages that are dying out, and about how the internet changes language. Crystal often appears on radio and television. He is known for explaining difficult ideas in a clear and friendly way. He has also helped theatres perform Shakespeare's plays using the pronunciation of Shakespeare's own time. He is still active as a writer and speaker.

Angus Deaton is an economist. He was born in 1945 in Edinburgh, Scotland. His father was a coal miner who valued education highly. Deaton won scholarships to good schools and then studied at the University of Cambridge in England. After a short job at the Bank of England, Deaton became a university teacher. He taught in Britain, at Cambridge and Bristol. In 1983 he moved to Princeton University in the United States, where he spent most of his career. He now holds both British and American citizenship. Deaton's work is about real, practical questions. How much do people spend, and on what? How is poverty measured? Why do some people live long, healthy lives while others do not? He is famous for being careful with data and for asking whether the numbers we use can really be trusted. In 2015 Deaton won the Nobel Prize in Economics. The prize honoured his work on consumption, poverty, and welfare. Deaton has also written books for general readers, such as 'The Great Escape' and 'Economics in America'. With his wife, the economist Anne Case, he studied a worrying rise in early deaths among some Americans. In recent years Deaton has openly questioned parts of mainstream economics that he once supported.

Tony Judt was a British-American historian. He was one of the most important historians of postwar Europe and a sharp public intellectual. His massive 2005 book Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 is widely considered one of the great works of modern historical writing. He was born in 1948 in London. He died in 2010 in New York, aged 62, from complications of motor neurone disease. He came from a Jewish family with roots in Eastern Europe. His parents were secular socialists. He grew up in north London. He studied history at King's College Cambridge from 1966. He spent time in Israel as a young man, where he worked on a kibbutz and briefly served in the Israeli army during the 1967 Six-Day War. The experience shaped him deeply. He returned home increasingly critical of Israeli policies, while remaining deeply engaged with Jewish history and identity. He earned his PhD in 1972. He taught at Cambridge and Oxford, then moved to the United States in 1987. He became professor of European history at New York University, where he taught for the rest of his career. In 1995 he founded the Remarque Institute at NYU for the study of Europe. He wrote across many fields: French intellectual history, postwar European history, contemporary politics, and questions of social democracy and political memory. He was politically a social democrat. He criticised both the radical left and the contemporary right. Some of his views, especially his strong criticism of Israeli policies and his 2003 essay calling for a binational state in Israel-Palestine, made him controversial. In 2008 he was diagnosed with motor neurone disease, also called ALS. The disease gradually paralysed him while leaving his mind intact. He continued writing through dictation. His final books, written as he was dying, are some of his most powerful. He died in 2010.

Christopher Hitchens was a British-American journalist, essayist, and writer. He was one of the most famous public intellectuals of the late 20th and early 21st centuries. He wrote about politics, literature, religion, and many other subjects. He was known for sharp arguments, beautiful prose, and a willingness to take unpopular positions. He was born in 1949 in Portsmouth, on the south coast of England. He came from a middle-class British military family. His father was a navy officer. His mother was Jewish, though he only learned this as an adult. He studied philosophy, politics, and economics at Oxford from 1967. He was active in left-wing student politics. After university he became a journalist. He wrote for left-wing magazines including the New Statesman. In 1981 he moved to the United States. He wrote a regular column for The Nation, a major American left-wing magazine, for nearly 20 years. He became an American citizen in 2007. He wrote for many other publications including Vanity Fair, The Atlantic, and Slate. He was prolific. He wrote 17 books and thousands of articles. For most of his career, he was on the political left. He was a friend of writers like Salman Rushdie, Martin Amis, and Ian McEwan. After the September 11 attacks in 2001, his politics shifted. He supported the Iraq war in 2003. Many of his old left-wing friends saw this as betrayal. He defended his position fiercely. In 2007 he published God Is Not Great, an aggressive attack on religion. The book made him one of the New Atheists alongside Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and Daniel Dennett. He was diagnosed with oesophageal cancer in 2010. He continued writing about his illness with extraordinary honesty. He died in December 2011, aged 62.

Zaha Hadid was an Iraqi-British architect. She was one of the most important architects of the late 20th and early 21st centuries. She was the first woman to win the Pritzker Prize, the highest honour in architecture, in 2004. Her buildings are known for bold curves, dramatic angles, and shapes that look impossible to build. She was born in 1950 in Baghdad, Iraq. She came from a wealthy and progressive Iraqi family. Her father was a politician and businessman. Her mother was an artist. Iraq in the 1950s was modernising rapidly. Zaha grew up surrounded by modern art and modern architecture. She attended a Catholic school in Baghdad and a boarding school in England. She studied mathematics at the American University of Beirut, in Lebanon, before turning to architecture. In 1972 she moved to London to study at the Architectural Association School of Architecture, one of the most experimental architecture schools in the world. She graduated in 1977. She worked briefly with her former teachers Rem Koolhaas and Elia Zenghelis at OMA. In 1980 she founded her own practice, Zaha Hadid Architects, in London. For her first 15 years, almost none of her designs were built. Her drawings won prizes and inspired other architects, but clients found her buildings too radical to commission. Her breakthrough came with the Vitra Fire Station in Germany, completed in 1993. From then on, her practice grew. By her death she had designed buildings on every inhabited continent. She died suddenly in 2016, aged 65, of a heart attack while being treated for bronchitis in Miami. Her practice continues without her. Her partner Patrik Schumacher has led it since her death. Her best-known buildings include the Aquatics Centre at the 2012 London Olympics and the Heydar Aliyev Centre in Baku, Azerbaijan.