- Winston Churchill
Sir Winston Leonard Spencer-Churchill, KG, OM, CH, TD, FRS, PC (Can) (30 November 1874 - 24 January 1965) was a British politician who served as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1940 to 1945 and again from 1951 to 1955. A noted statesman, orator and strategist, Churchill was also a soldier in the British Army. He has been studied to a unique extent as part of modern British and world history. - John F. Kennedy
John Fitzgerald Kennedy , also referred to as John F. Kennedy, Kennedy, John Kennedy, Jack Kennedy, or JFK, was the thirty-fifth President of the United States. In 1960 he became the youngest person ever to be elected President of the United States, and the second youngest, after Theodore Roosevelt, to serve. Kennedy served from 1961 until his assassination in 1963. - Joseph Stalin
Josef Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili ("Ioseb Besarionis Dze Jughashvili";, "Iosif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili") (March 5 1953), better known by his adopted name, Joseph Stalin (alternatively transliterated Josef Stalin), was General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union's Central Committee from 1922 until his death in 1953. Despite his formal position being originally without significant influence, … - Michael Howard
Sir Michael Eliot Howard, OM, CH, CBE, MC (born 29 November 1922) is a retired British military historian, formerly Chichele Professor of the History of War and Regius Professor of Modern History at Oxford University, and Robert A. Lovett Professor of Military and Naval History at Yale University. Howard was educated at Wellington College and Christ Church, Oxford (with service in World War II in between). - Orson Welles
George Orson Welles (May 6, 1915 - October 10, 1985) was an Academy Award-winning American screenwriter, a radio, film and theatre director, a radio and film producer and an actor in film and theatre, as well as a Grammy Award-winning radio personality. Welles first gained wide notoriety for his October 30, 1938 radio broadcast of H. G. Wells' "The War of the Worlds". Adapted to sound like a contemporary news broadcast, … - John Brown
John Henry Owen Brown was a Non-Commissioned Officer in the Royal Artillery in the British army, who served in France at the beginning of the Second World War. He was captured on 29 May 1940 and remained a prisoner of war until 1945. He volunteered to serve at Blechhammer camp in Upper Silesia, and generally ingratiated himself with the Germans. In due course he was transferred to the camp at Genshagen, which he effectively ran for the Germans. - Alan Turing
This short on-line biography of Alan Turing is based on the entry I wrote for the British Dictionary of National Biography in 1995. The eight parts correspond roughly to the eight sections of my full biography Alan Turing : the enigma. There are no hyperlinks in the text. For links and for more images, go to the corresponding page of the Alan Turing Internet Scrapbook. Part 8 - Alan Turing 's Crisis - Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Jean-Jacques Rousseau is a Belgian absurdist film director. He was born in Souvret (Courcelles) after the Second World War. He defends "popular" cinema, filming with very small budgets (2000 to 2500€ per film), and using unknown or non-professional actors. He calls himself "the director of the absurd". His films drift between realism and surrealism, and are often shown at film festivals of the genre. His life will be the subject of Yann Moix's next film, … - Antony Beevor
Antony James Beevor (born December 14 1946) is a British historian, educated at Winchester College and Sandhurst. He studied under the famous historian of World War II, John Keegan. Beevor is a former officer with the 11th Hussars, who has published several popular histories on the Second World War and 20th century in general. - Dietrich Bonhoeffer
Dietrich Bonhoeffer (February 4, 1906 - April 9, 1945) was a German Lutheran pastor, theologian, participant in the German Resistance movement against Nazism, and a founding member of the Confessing Church. He was involved in plots planned by members of the Abwehr (the German Military Intelligence Office) to assassinate Adolf Hitler. He was arrested in March 1943, imprisoned, and eventually hanged just before the end of the World War II in Europe. - John Harris
John Harris (30 June 1917, in Glasgow - 24 June 1988 in Sheffield) was a Scottish footballer nicknamed "Gentleman John". Harris was born to be a footballer, being the son of former Scottish international centre-forward and Newcastle United player Neil Harris. He played for Swindon Town before moving to Swansea Town in 1934 when the side was managed by his father. In 1939, he played for both Tottenham Hotspur and Wolverhampton Wanderers. - Heinz Guderian
Heinz Wilhelm Guderian was a military theorist and innovative General of the German Army during the Second World War. Germany's panzer forces were raised and fought according to his works, best-known among them "Achtung— Panzer!" He held posts as Panzer Corps commander, Panzer Army commander, Inspector-General of Armored Troops, and Chief of Staff of the Army (Chef des Generalstabs des Heeres). - John Lee
John Lee is an American writer of thrillers, many of them set in Second World War settings, as well as non-fiction books. He is also a lecturer in journalism, distinguished by his conscious decision not to take up a doctorate despite having made all the preparations for it. He is married to Barbara Moore and regularly commutes between Memphis, Tennessee and Texas. - Douglas Bader
Group Captain Sir Douglas Robert Steuart Bader, CBE, DSO and Bar, DFC and Bar, FRAeS, DL, RAF (21 February 1910-5 September 1982); surname pronounced) was a successful fighter pilot in the Royal Air Force during the Second World War. Bader is upheld as an inspirational leader and hero of the era, not least because he fought despite having lost both legs in a pre-war flying accident. - George Melly
Alan George Heywood Melly was an English jazz and blues singer and writer. From 1965–1973 he was a film and television critic for "The Observer". He also lectured on art history, with an emphasis on Surrealism. - Bill Stone
William "Bill" Stone (born 23 September, 1900 in Ledstone, Devon, England) is one of the few surviving British veterans of the First World War. He is the last known veteran living in Britain to have served in both the First and the Second World War. Stone was one of fourteen children and enlisted into the Royal Navy on his 18th birthday, and went on to serve both as a Stoker aboard the battlecruiser HMS "Tiger". - Lee Miller
Elizabeth 'Lee' Miller (23 April 1907 - 21 July 1977) was an American photographer. Born in Poughkeepsie, New York State in 1907, she was a successful fashion model in New York City in the 1920s before going to Paris to become a fashion and fine art photographer. During the Second World War, she became an acclaimed war correspondent and photojournalist - Stafford Cripps
Sir Richard Stafford Cripps, known as Stafford Cripps was a British Labour politician and Chancellor of the Exchequer for several years after the Second World War. - John Ward
John Ward (1921 - 1995) was a Royal Air Force (RAF) airman (Flight Lieutenant), an ex-POW, and a member of the Polish resistance Armia Krajowa (Home Army) in occupied Poland of Second World War. Ward was born in the Birmingham suburb of Ward End and joined the RAF in 1937, aged 18, as a wireless operator. Shot down by the Germans in the early phase of the war (in 1940), he escaped the POW camp in April 1941 and joined the Polish resistance. - James Webb
James Webb (January 13, 1946 - May 9, 1980) was a Scottish historian and biographer. Webb, born in Edinburgh, was educated at Harrow and Trinity College, Cambridge. He is remembered primarily for two works "The Occult Underground" and "The Occult Establishment". "Occult Underground" was originally titled "Flight from Reason". He also wrote an important, and somewhat debated biography of G. I. Gurdjieff, "The Harmonious Circle". - John Morris
Dr. John Morris (1913 - June 1977) was an English historian who specialised in the study of the institutions of the Roman Empire and the history of Sub-Roman Britain. He is best known for "The Age of Arthur" (1973), in which he attempted to reconstruct the history of Britain and Ireland during the so-called "Dark Ages" following the Roman withdrawal, based on scattered archaeological and historical records. - John Thompson
John Thompson was an influential Canadian poet. Born in Timperley, Cheshire, England, his father was killed in the Second World War. He was educated at Sheffield University, and received a Ph.D from Michigan State University in 1966. That same year he began teaching at Mount Allison University in Sackville, New Brunswick, Canada, where he lived in a farmhouse at Wood Point overlooking the Tantramar Marshes. - David Morris
David Morris was a Welsh politician, member of the European Parliament, chairman of CND Cymru and peace activist. As a young man, Morris worked in a steel foundry in Llanelli, South Wales. During the Second World War, he was conscripted to work down coal mines as a Bevin Boy. He gained a scholarship to Ruskin College, Oxford, and later became a Presbyterian minister. - John Erickson
John Erickson (1929- 2002) was a British historian who wrote extensively on the Second World War, with books on Operation Barbarossa and the Battle of Stalingrad. He was Professor Emeritus and Honorary Fellow in Defence Studies at the University of Edinburgh. His wife, Ljubica Erickson, spent many years with her husband researching Russian military affairs, in particular the Soviet Army and the Soviet-German war. - Jan Smuts
Field Marshal Jan Christiaan Smuts, OM, CH, PC, ED, KC, FRS (May 24, 1870 - September 11, 1950) was a prominent South African and British Commonwealth statesman, military leader, and philosopher. In addition to various cabinet appointments, he served as Prime Minister of the Union of South Africa from 1919 until 1924 and from 1939 until 1948. He served as a British Field Marshal in both the First World War and the Second World War. - Alan Furst
Alan Furst (born February 20, 1941) is an American author of historical spy novels set just prior to and during the Second World War. Born in New York City, and raised on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, Furst received a B.A. from Oberlin College in 1962 and an M.A. from Penn State in 1967. Furst's papers, on deposit at the Ransom Humanities Center in the University of Texas at Austin, … - Carol Reed
Sir Carol Reed (30 December, 1906 - 25 April, 1976) was an English film director, winner of an Academy Award for his film version of the musical, "Oliver!" (1968). An illegitimate son of actor-producer Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree and his mistress, May Pinney Reed, Carol Reed was born in Putney, London, and educated at The King's School, Canterbury. Reed served in the British Army during the Second World War, … - Sophie Scholl
Sophia Magdalena Scholl (9 May 1921 - 22 February 1943), along with her brother Hans Scholl, were members of the White Rose non-violent resistance movement in Nazi Germany. They were both convicted of treason and executed by guillotine. Since the 1970s she has been celebrated as one of those Germans who actively opposed the Third Reich during the Second World War. - Denis Macshane
Denis MacShane (born May 21, 1948, Glasgow) is a politician in the United Kingdom. He is Labour Member of Parliament for Rotherham, and was the Minister of State for Europe at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office until the ministerial reshuffle that followed the 2005 general election. He first entered Parliament after a 1994 by-election caused by the death of Jimmy Boyce. He was born as Denis Matyjaszek, to an Irish mother and her Polish husband, … - Jimmy Doolittle
General James Harold "Jimmy" Doolittle, Sc.D. USAF (December 14 1896 - September 27 1993) was an American aviation pioneer. Doolittle served with as a general in the United States Army Air Forces during the Second World War, earning the Medal of Honor as the commander of the Doolittle Raid. - Richard Todd
Richard Todd (born June 11, 1919) is a British actor. - Robert Fraser
Sir Robert Fraser (1904-1984?) was an Australian who found success in the United Kingdom as a journalist, civil servant and eventually as the first Director General of the British Independent Television Authority (ITA). Originally hailing from Adelaide, Australia, Fraser came to the United Kingdom in the 1920s to follow up his degree from Melbourne University with further study at the London School of Economics. - Alex Callinicos
Alexander Theodore Callinicos (born 24 July 1950 in Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe)) is a Marxist intellectual and a member of the Central Committee of the Socialist Workers' Party. He received his BA and DPhil from the University of Oxford, and was Professor of Politics at the University of York before being appointed Professor of European Studies at King's College London in 2005. - Alan Taylor
Alan Taylor (1924-1997) was a television presenter, popular in Wales and the West Country during the 1960s and 1970s. Taylor was originally from Cardiff, where his family had an electrical business. He served in the Royal Navy during the Second World War. He began his television career as a continuity announcer with TWW in 1959. After presenting a birthday slot with a glove puppet called "Tinker", … - Stanley Spencer
Sir Stanley Spencer (30 June 1891 - 14 December 1959) was an English painter. - Leonard Cheshire
Group Captain Geoffrey Leonard Cheshire, Baron Cheshire, VC, OM, DSO and Two Bars, DFC (7 September 1917 – 31 July 1992) was a British RAF pilot during the Second World War who received the Victoria Cross, the highest and most prestigious award for gallantry in the face of the enemy that can be awarded to British and Commonwealth forces. After the war he became a charity worker, … - Harry Patch
Henry "Harry" Patch (born June 17, 1898) is, at age 109, one of the last three surviving British veterans of the First World War still living in the country. He is, as of 2007, the last surviving Tommy to have served on the Western Front. Before the Great War he worked as an apprentice plumber in Bath. In the Great War, Patch was conscripted into the Duke of Cornwall's Light Infantry. He was a private at the Third Battle of Ypres. - Richard Johnson
Richard Johnson (born July 30, 1927 in Upminster) is an English actor, writer and producer, who starred in several British films of the 1960s and has also had a distinguished stage career. Born in Upminster, England, Johnson trained at RADA and made his first professional appearances on stage with Sir John Gielgud's company. During the Second World War he served in the navy, and made his film debut in 1951. - Robert Alexander
Robert Alexander (born 24 September 1910 in Belfast; died 19 July 1943 in Sicily) was an Irish cricket and Rugby Union player. He died on active service in the Second World War. - Peter Fraser
Peter Fraser (1884 - 1950) served as Prime Minister of New Zealand from 27 March 1940 until 13 December 1949. He held the office through most of the Second World War. Historians see him as a major figure in the history of the New Zealand Labour Party; he served longer than any other New Zealand Labour Prime Minister to date.
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