Born in Ankara to a British diplomat, Joe Strummer (real name: John Graham Mellor) spent parts of his early childhood in Cairo, Mexico City and Bonn before boarding at a school in Surrey. He attended ...

Lieutenant-General. Commander during the early stages of the Peninsular War, 1808, he was cut off from Portugal by the French and obliged to make a forced march to the coast at Corunna to embark his ...

Daniel Defoe was a novelist, pamphleteer and journalist who gained enduring fame for his novel Robinson Crusoe (1719). Defoe is notable for being one of the earliest practitioners of the novel who ...

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Johnston was closely involved in what has been called the 'scramble for Africa' by 19th-century colonial powers. He published forty books on African subjects and in the 1890s was the first British ...

Campbell was initially apprenticed to an Edinburgh marble cutter. In 1816, his marble busts caught the attention of Gilbert Innes of Stow, who became his patron. Innes's financial support enabled ...

James Gillray was the leading satirist of the regency producing numerous biting and funny caricatures on politics, royalty and social life. The National Portrait Gallery owns copies of over ninety ...

Richard Graves was an English poet and novelist. Born in Gloucestershire, he was the son of an antiquary of the same name. Graves was a fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, but lost this position ...

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Born in Grenada, East Caribbean in 1945, John emigrated to Britain in 1964. He is an associate professor of education and honorary fellow of the University of London (UCL) Institute of Education and ...

Sir Norman Angell is awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Angell was recognised for his book, Europe's Optical Illusion (or The Great Illusion) first published in 1910 and updated in 1933, which argued that ...