Ellmann wilde biography of mahatma
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Reading the Lives of Others
My God, how does one write a biography?” asked Virginia Woolf when tasked with writing the life of her friend Roger Fry. This question has occasionally crossed my mind. More often, though, I have wondered: why does one read a biography? The common impulses are easily listed: to discover fascinating lives; to revel in the range of human experience; to understand what makes great men and women tick; or to peel the layers of myth that swaddle them; the capacity of exemplary human stories to inspire us. Despite a long-standing addiction to biographies, I seem to have no good answer. I periodically oscillate in my preference for biographies that either uncover the inwardness of human motivation or that focus on the intersection of an individual life and the eddies of history that swirl around it.
Looking back, I am struck that the very first biographies that I read fell into these two categories. As a teenager immersed in the worlds of mathematics and the physical sciences, I chanced upon in an uncle’s library two recently published books. The first was Chandra, a biography of the astrophysicist and Nobel laureate, Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, by Kameshwar Wali. And the other was The Man Who Knew Infinity by Robert Kanigel, on the mathem
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Famous Last Words: 9 Icons and Their Apparent Final Thoughts
Uttered in the last moments of consciousness, a person’s final words seem to say something essential about who that person really was, and about the life he or she lived. In some cases, history has even put certain last words into people’s mouths when they didn’t actually say them right before dying or didn’t say them at all — just because those last words seemed so fitting.
Whether said in public or murmured in a hushed bedroom to a family member or caretaker, the last words of many famous people have been recorded (and misrecorded) by history, and continue to fascinate those who come after them. Last words can inspire or instruct us, offer a cautionary tale or even make us laugh.
With that in mind, here are the memorable last words attributed to nine famous people and a look at whether they were, in fact, spoken during their final moments.
“I’m bored with it all.” -Winston Churchill
Winston Churchill
In his book The Private Lives of Winston Churchill, John Pearson wrote that the 90-year-old former British prime minister said this to his son-in-law Christopher Soames after Soames offered him some champagne. Shortly afterward, Churchill, who had recently suffered the latest in a series of strokes, sa
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