This Human —

At nineteen, Maria Schneider was cast opposite Marlon Brando in what would become one of the most controversial films ever made. What happened on the set of Last Tango in Paris — a scene improvised without her knowledge or consent — would define her ... more

The son of Ukrainian-Jewish immigrants, Leonard Nimoy grew up in a Boston tenement where Yiddish filled the kitchen and English climbed the stairs. He left for Hollywood at eighteen with two hundred dollars and spent seventeen years in obscurity befo... more

Before Gloria Steinem became the most recognised face of American feminism, she was a girl who never attended a full year of school — wintering in a trailer with a dreamer father and caring for a mother whose brilliant mind was unravelling. That chil... more

William Morris was the most influential designer in Victorian England — and a committed Marxist revolutionary. He created over 600 patterns for wallpaper and textiles, founded a firm that transformed British taste, and built a printing press that pro... more

Akira Kurosawa was the first Japanese filmmaker to break through to global audiences — and the cost of that breakthrough defined his life as much as the achievement itself. He was a man who could demand real arrows be fired at his lead actor, drain a... more

He was fifty years old and the most famous poet in Rome when the Emperor Augustus sent him to the edge of the known world. No trial. No appeal. Just two words he'd repeat for the rest of his life — carmen et error, a poem and a mistake — and a one-wa... more

David Livingstone was born in a single room in a cotton mill tenement in Blantyre, Scotland, one of seven children. He started working at age ten — fourteen-hour days tying broken threads under a spinning jenny — and spent his first week's wages on a... more

Wilfred Owen published five poems in his lifetime. He was twenty-five years old when he was killed at the Sambre-Oise Canal in northern France — seven days before the Armistice. His mother received the telegram while the church bells were ringing for... more