Who Is Warren Buffett?

1. Omaha, a paper route and the first lessons

Warren Edward Buffett was born on 30 August 1930 in Omaha, Nebraska, the second of three children of Howard Buffett, a stockbroker who later served in the United States Congress, and Leila Stahl Buffett. His father ran a small brokerage, and the young Buffett grew up around talk of shares, prices and businesses, delivering newspapers, selling chewing gum and soft drinks, and keeping careful records of his earnings. He bought his first shares at the age of eleven, three shares of a company called Cities Service, and he has told the story many times as a lesson in patience: he sold them too early, for a small profit, and watched the price rise far beyond what he had received. The anecdote is characteristic of his teaching style, which uses small, personal stories to make general points about investing.

His education was shaped by two teachers who pulled in different directions. At the University of Nebraska he studied business, and at Columbia University he studied under Benjamin Graham, the economist whose book The Intelligent Investor became the foundation of Buffett's approach. Graham taught that a share is a part ownership of a business, that the market is a mechanism for buying and selling those parts, and that an investor should buy when the price is well below the value of the business and then wait. Buffett has described Graham's teaching as the most important intellectual event of his life, and he has returned to its principles in his shareholder letters for sixty years. He also learned from his later partner, Charlie Munger, who taught him that it was better to buy a wonderful business at a fair price than a fair business at a wonderful price, a correction that shaped Berkshire's later acquisitions.

The early years of his investing career were modest in scale and disciplined in method. He worked briefly for Graham's investment firm, then returned to Omaha in 1956 and formed a series of investment partnerships, pooling money from family, friends and neighbours and investing it according to Graham's principles. The partnerships did well, and by the early 1960s Buffett was managing substantial sums for his partners. He closed the partnerships in 1969, telling his partners that he could no longer find enough undervalued securities to justify continuing, a decision that showed the same discipline he would later show at Berkshire: he would rather stop than compromise his standards. By then he had already begun buying shares in Berkshire Hathaway, a textile mill in New England, and the purchase that followed would define his life.

2. Berkshire Hathaway: from textile mill to conglomerate

Berkshire Hathaway was, when Buffett began buying it, a struggling textile manufacturer, the result of a merger between the Berkshire Fine Spinning Associates and the Hathaway Manufacturing Company. Buffett bought the shares because they were cheap, not because he admired the textile business, and in 1965 he took control of the company. He later described the purchase as a mistake in one sense, because the textile business was in long-term decline and the money invested in it could have earned more elsewhere, but it gave him a listed company, a source of capital and a platform from which to build. Over the following years he used the cash generated by the textile business, and then by the insurance businesses he acquired, to buy other businesses, and the textile mill itself was eventually closed. The transformation is one of the most remarkable in business history: a company that made shirts became a holding company for some of the best-known businesses in America.

The key to the transformation was insurance. In 1967 Berkshire bought National Indemnity, an insurance company, and later acquired GEICO, the car insurer, and other insurance businesses. Insurance was attractive to Buffett for a reason that he has explained many times: an insurer collects premiums before it pays claims, so it holds large sums of money, known as float, that can be invested while the claims are pending. If the insurance business is run well, the float is effectively a loan that costs nothing, and the investment returns on it belong to the shareholder. Buffett built Berkshire around this insight, using the float to buy shares in public companies and to acquire whole businesses, and he insisted that the insurance businesses be run with discipline, refusing to write policies at prices that did not make sense, even when that meant losing market share.

The businesses Berkshire acquired tell the story of Buffett's taste. He bought See's Candies, a California confectioner, in 1972, and has cited it as a lesson in the value of a strong brand and a loyal customer base. He bought the Nebraska Furniture Mart, the Buffalo News and other local businesses whose managers he trusted and left alone. He bought the Burlington Northern Santa Fe railway, one of the largest freight railways in the United States, and large stakes in companies such as Coca-Cola, American Express and Apple. The pattern was consistent: he bought businesses he understood, with durable competitive advantages, honest managers and a record of earning good returns on the capital they employed, and then he held them, often for decades. The patience is the point: Berkshire's success was built not on trading but on owning good businesses for a very long time.

3. Value investing, explained in plain language

Buffett's investing philosophy is usually described as value investing, and its principles can be stated simply, even if they are difficult to follow. First, a share is a part of a business, not a piece of paper to be traded. Second, the value of a business is the cash it will generate over its lifetime, discounted to the present. Third, the market is often wrong in the short term, driven by fear and greed, and it therefore offers opportunities to buy good businesses at prices below their value. Fourth, the investor's job is to wait for those opportunities, to buy when the margin of safety is large, and then to hold, ignoring the daily noise of the market. These ideas come from Benjamin Graham, but Buffett added to them an emphasis on the quality of the business, on the durability of its competitive advantage, which he called a moat, and on the character of its managers.

The shareholder letters are the best introduction to this philosophy, and they are also the reason Buffett's influence extends far beyond Berkshire's shareholders. Each year since the 1960s he has written a letter to Berkshire's owners, explaining what the company did, what it earned, what mistakes were made and what he thinks about the economy, and the letters have become a widely read text on business and investing. They are written in plain English, with humour, with admissions of error, and with a willingness to explain complex ideas simply. He has used them to warn against the dangers of debt, to criticise the excesses of Wall Street, to explain the insurance business, and to argue that the long-term interests of shareholders, managers and customers are the same. Students, investors and managers around the world read them, and they have been collected in books and studied in business schools.

The letters also show a distinctive attitude to risk. Buffett has argued that risk is not the same as volatility, the daily movement of share prices, but the permanent loss of capital, and that the best way to reduce risk is to understand what you own. He has warned against investing in businesses you do not understand, against borrowing to invest, and against the temptation to follow the crowd. His famous advice to be fearful when others are greedy and greedy when others are fearful is a summary of this attitude: the market's moods are an opportunity for the patient investor, not a guide to what to do. The advice is easy to quote and hard to follow, which is why it has remained relevant for so long.

4. The annual meeting and the culture of Berkshire

Berkshire Hathaway's annual shareholder meeting in Omaha has become a cultural event in its own right, sometimes called the Woodstock for Capitalists. Tens of thousands of shareholders travel to Omaha each spring to hear Buffett and, until his death in 2023, Charlie Munger answer questions for hours, without notes, on subjects ranging from the company's investments to the state of the economy, the future of American business and the meaning of a good life. The meeting is also a showcase for Berkshire's businesses, with products on display and managers available to talk to shareholders, and it reflects a culture that Buffett built deliberately: a culture of decentralisation, in which the managers of Berkshire's businesses run their companies as if they owned them, with little interference from headquarters, and of trust, in which Buffett's job is to allocate capital and to choose managers, not to manage the businesses himself.

That culture is one of Berkshire's most important assets, and it is also one of the hardest to copy. It depends on Buffett's reputation, on his willingness to pay managers well and to leave them alone, and on a headquarters staff that has remained remarkably small for a company of Berkshire's size. It also depends on a set of principles that Buffett has repeated for decades: that Berkshire will not sell a good business, that it will not make acquisitions for the sake of growth, that it will keep a large amount of cash available for opportunities, and that it will treat its shareholders as partners rather than as a source of capital to be exploited. The annual meeting is where those principles are restated each year, and where shareholders can judge whether they are being followed.

The partnership with Charlie Munger was central to this culture. Munger, who joined Buffett as vice-chairman in 1978 and remained his closest collaborator until his death in November 2023 at the age of ninety-nine, brought a different temperament and a wider range of reading to the partnership, drawing on psychology, history and the sciences to think about decision-making. Buffett has said many times that Berkshire would not be what it is without Munger, and that Munger's influence was to push him from buying cheap, mediocre businesses to buying good businesses at fair prices. The two men were known for their public disagreements and their mutual respect, and their partnership is often cited as one of the great collaborations in business history.

5. Giving, and the question of what money is for

Buffett has long argued that the purpose of accumulating capital is not to consume it but to allocate it well, and his approach to philanthropy follows the same logic. In 2006 he announced that he would give the bulk of his Berkshire shares to philanthropic foundations, above all the Gates Foundation, founded by Bill Gates and Melinda French Gates, and to foundations run by his children. The gifts are made in annual instalments, and Buffett has said that he intends to give away the great majority of his shares during his lifetime and after his death. The scale of the commitment is one of the largest acts of philanthropy in history, and it has been widely discussed as a model for how the very wealthy might use their resources.

The decision was consistent with his long-held views about inheritance. He has said that he wants to give his children enough that they can do anything, but not so much that they can do nothing, and that the children of the wealthy should not inherit vast sums simply because of the accident of birth. He has also argued that the market system, which he has defended throughout his career, works best when those who have benefited most from it give back, and that philanthropy should be judged by its results, not by its intentions. The Gates Foundation, to which he has given the largest share, focuses on global health, education and poverty, and Buffett has served as a trustee of the foundation, a role that connected his investing discipline to the discipline of giving.

The question of what money is for runs through his shareholder letters as well. He has written about the difference between price and value, about the dangers of confusing a rising share price with success, and about the importance of measuring a business by the value it creates for its customers and its owners over time. He lives in the same house in Omaha that he bought in 1958, eats at the same restaurants, and has described his life as one of simple pleasures: reading, playing bridge, and working with people he likes. The modesty is genuine, and it is part of his public image, but it is also a deliberate statement: that the work of investing, and the work of giving, is interesting in itself, and that the accumulation of money is a means rather than an end.

6. Mistakes, critics and the limits of the method

Buffett has been unusually candid about his mistakes, and the shareholder letters contain a long list of them. He has described the purchase of Berkshire's textile business itself as a mistake, the purchase of a shoe company that later failed, the decision to sell shares in companies that went on to do well, and the failure to buy shares in businesses he understood but judged too expensive. He has also admitted to errors of omission, the opportunities he did not take, and he has argued that the mistakes of omission are often more costly than the mistakes of commission. The candour is not modesty for its own sake: it is a teaching method, a way of showing that even the most successful investor makes errors, and that the discipline is to learn from them rather than to hide them.

Critics of Buffett have made several arguments, and they deserve to be stated fairly. Some have argued that his success depended on the particular conditions of the American economy in the second half of the twentieth century, a period of sustained growth and rising markets, and that his methods may be harder to apply in a different era. Others have argued that Berkshire's size now works against it, because the company is so large that it cannot find enough opportunities to move its results, and that its cash pile, which has grown very large, is a sign that it cannot find attractive investments. Still others have pointed to specific decisions, such as the purchase of certain businesses that performed poorly, or the sale of shares in companies that later rose, as evidence that his judgement is not infallible. Buffett has acknowledged the force of the size argument in particular, telling shareholders that Berkshire's future returns are likely to be lower than its past returns, a statement that is characteristic of his honesty about the limits of his own method.

There is also a debate about whether value investing as Buffett practises it can be taught. His defenders argue that the principles are simple and that the difficulty is psychological: the patience, the independence of mind, the willingness to be unpopular. His critics argue that his success depended on a particular temperament and on access to information and capital that most investors do not have, and that the attempt to copy him has led many investors to buy cheap shares in bad businesses, the opposite of what he intended. The debate is unresolved, and it is likely to continue, but the fact that it is conducted in the terms Buffett himself set, in the language of value, moats and margins of safety, is itself a measure of his influence.

7. Succession, Greg Abel and what Berkshire becomes next

The question of who would succeed Buffett was asked for decades, and for many years he declined to name a successor publicly. In 2021 he confirmed that Greg Abel, the vice-chairman who ran Berkshire's non-insurance businesses, was his designated successor, and at the annual meeting on 3 May 2025 he announced that he would ask the board to appoint Abel as chief executive at the end of the year. The board agreed, and Abel took over as chief executive on 1 January 2026, with Buffett remaining as chairman. On 18 September 2026 Buffett stepped down as chair, his son Howard Buffett succeeded him, and Warren Buffett became chair emeritus and remained a director. The announcement was a surprise in its timing, even to many in the audience, but not in its substance: Abel had been prepared for the role for years, and the transition was presented as a planned handover rather than a sudden change.

The succession raises a question that will occupy Berkshire's shareholders for years: how much of Berkshire's success was Buffett himself, and how much was the system he built? The optimists argue that the system, the decentralised culture, the discipline about capital allocation, the insurance float, is durable, and that Abel, who has worked inside it for decades, will preserve it. The sceptics argue that Buffett's judgement, his reputation and his ability to make large acquisitions on the strength of his name were irreplaceable, and that Berkshire will become a more ordinary company without him. The honest answer is that no one knows yet, and that the test will be measured over years, not quarters. What can be said is that Buffett chose a successor who shares his temperament, who is known for operational discipline rather than for showmanship, and who has the trust of Berkshire's managers.

For readers who want to understand investing, Buffett's legacy is already clear, whatever happens to Berkshire next. He showed that a disciplined, patient approach to owning businesses could outperform the market over a very long period, that the shareholder letter could be a work of literature as well as a report, and that an investor could become a public teacher without becoming a celebrity in the modern sense. He also showed that the work of investing is, at its best, a form of stewardship: the careful allocation of other people's money, the honest admission of mistakes, and the willingness to give most of it away. That is why his influence extends beyond finance, into management, education and philanthropy, and why the question of who Warren Buffett is cannot be answered with a list of businesses alone.

Frequently asked questions

Sources and further reading

• Encyclopaedia Britannica — Warren Buffett
• Wikipedia — Warren Buffett
• Berkshire Hathaway — Official site
• Berkshire Hathaway — Warren Buffett's 2024 letter to shareholders

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• Who Is Virat Kohli? — Virat Kohli is India's modern batting great, the record holder for ODI centuries and a World Cup winner, still active in one-day cricket in 2026.
• Who Is Vladimir Putin? — Vladimir Putin has led Russia since 2000 — as president and, for four years, as prime minister. This explains his rise, his rule and his role in the world.
• Who Is Wasim Akram? — Wasim Akram is Pakistan's greatest fast bowler, the first to 500 ODI wickets and hero of the 1992 World Cup final, famed as the master of swing.
• Who Is Xi Jinping? — Xi Jinping has led China since 2012 as general secretary of the Communist Party and since 2013 as president, shaping its policies and vision.
• Who Is Zinedine Zidane? — Zinedine Zidane won the World Cup as a player and three Champions Leagues as a manager, and in July 2026 was appointed head coach of France.
• Who Was A. P. J. Abdul Kalam? — A. P. J. Abdul Kalam rose from a poor boyhood in Rameswaram to lead India's space and missile programmes, then served as the country's 11th president.
• Who Was Abdul Sattar Edhi? — Abdul Sattar Edhi built Pakistan's largest welfare network from a single free dispensary. This explains his life, his foundation and his legacy.
• Who Was Abdus Salam? — Abdus Salam won the 1979 Nobel Prize in Physics for unifying two forces of nature. This explains his science, his institutions and his contested legacy.
• Who Was Abraham Lincoln? — Abraham Lincoln preserved the Union through the Civil War and ended slavery. This explains his rise, his presidency and his contested legacy.
• Who Was Ada Lovelace? — Ada Lovelace published the first program for a programmable machine in 1843. This explains her notes, her vision of computing and the debate over her role.
• Who Was Adolf Hitler? — Adolf Hitler led the Nazi Party and ruled Germany as dictator from 1933 to 1945, started the Second World War in Europe and was central to the Holocaust.
• Who Was Alan Turing? — Alan Turing defined modern computing, broke German naval Enigma and proposed the Turing test. This explains his science, his war work and his tragic end.
• Who Was Albert Einstein? — Albert Einstein rewrote physics with relativity and won the Nobel Prize for the photoelectric effect. This explains his ideas, his life and his legacy.
• Who Was Alexander Graham Bell? — Alexander Graham Bell patented the first practical telephone in 1876. This explains his work with the deaf, the patent fight and his wider inventions.
• Who Was Alexander the Great? — Alexander the Great built one of history's largest empires before dying at 32. This explains his conquests, his cities and the debate over his legacy.
• Who Was Alfred Nobel? — Alfred Nobel invented dynamite, held 355 patents and founded the Nobel Prizes. This explains his explosives empire, his will and the prizes' legacy.
• Who Was Allama Iqbal? — Allama Iqbal was Pakistan's national poet, whose ideas shaped the case for Pakistan. This explains his poetry, his philosophy and his legacy.
• Who Was Benazir Bhutto? — Benazir Bhutto was the first woman to lead a Muslim-majority country, serving as prime minister of Pakistan in 1988-90 and 1993-96.
• Who Was Bob Marley? — Bob Marley took reggae from Jamaica to the world and became a symbol of peace, resistance and unity. This explains his life, his music and his legacy.
• Who Was Bruce Lee? — Bruce Lee was the martial artist and actor who carried Hong Kong action cinema to the world and founded Jeet Kune Do, leaving a lasting influence.
• Who Was Charles Darwin? — Charles Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection, published in On the Origin of Species in 1859, became the foundation of modern biology.
• Who Was Charles Dickens? — Charles Dickens was the greatest novelist of the Victorian era, whose serialised novels mixed comedy, social criticism and unforgettable characters.
• Who Was Charlie Chaplin? — Charlie Chaplin created the Little Tramp, the most famous screen character of the silent era, and directed classics City Lights and The Great Dictator.
• Who Was Cleopatra? — Cleopatra VII was the last ruler of Ptolemaic Egypt, a multilingual stateswoman who kept her kingdom independent for 21 years before Rome annexed it.
• Who Was Diego Maradona? — Diego Maradona was an Argentine footballer who captained Argentina to the 1986 World Cup and is widely regarded as one of the greatest players in history.
• Who Was Don Bradman? — Don Bradman was an Australian cricketer who averaged 99.94 in Test cricket, a record so far ahead of any other batsman that it remains famous in sport.
• Who Was Elvis Presley? — Elvis Presley took gospel, country and rhythm and blues and turned them into rock and roll, becoming the most famous singer of his century.
• Who Was Emily Dickinson? — Emily Dickinson was an American poet who wrote nearly 1,800 poems in private in Amherst, Massachusetts, and was barely published in her lifetime.
• Who Was Faiz Ahmed Faiz? — Faiz Ahmed Faiz was Pakistan's most celebrated modern Urdu poet, whose verse joined romantic lyricism with resistance to injustice.
• Who Was Franz Beckenbauer? — Franz Beckenbauer was a German footballer known as Der Kaiser, who won the World Cup as captain in 1974 and as manager in 1990.
• Who Was Freddie Mercury? — Freddie Mercury was the lead singer of Queen, a four-octave voice and fearless showman who wrote Bohemian Rhapsody and We Are the Champions.
• Who Was Frida Kahlo? — Frida Kahlo was a Mexican painter known for uncompromising, brilliantly coloured self-portraits exploring identity, the body and death.
• Who Was Galileo Galilei? — Galileo Galilei reshaped astronomy with his telescopic discoveries of 1610, defended a Sun-centred universe, and was tried by the Inquisition in 1633.
• Who Was Genghis Khan? — Genghis Khan united the Mongol tribes and built the largest contiguous land empire in history, a conqueror and lawgiver whose legacy is still argued over.
• Who Was George Washington? — George Washington won American independence, presided over the Constitutional Convention, and as first president defined the office — then walked away.
• Who Was Guglielmo Marconi? — Guglielmo Marconi was an Italian inventor who built the first practical wireless telegraph and sent the first transatlantic radio signal in 1901.
• Who Was Henry Ford? — Henry Ford was an American industrialist who founded the Ford Motor Company, built the Model T and perfected the moving assembly line.
• Who Was Isaac Newton? — Isaac Newton wrote the laws of motion and universal gravitation, invented calculus and transformed optics, leaving a lasting legacy in science.
• Who Was James Watt? — James Watt did not invent the steam engine, but his separate condenser of 1765 made it efficient enough to power the Industrial Revolution.
• Who Was Jane Austen? — Jane Austen published six novels in her lifetime, anonymously, and died at 41. This explains her life, her novels, her irony and her growing reputation.
• Who Was Jesus Christ? — Jesus of Nazareth is the central figure of Christianity, the world's largest religion. This explains his life in the Gospels, his teachings and his legacy.
• Who Was Johan Cruyff? — Johan Cruyff was the star of Total Football, won three Ballon d'Or awards, and as a manager built the Barcelona team that shaped modern football.
• Who Was Johannes Gutenberg? — Johannes Gutenberg built the first mechanised printing press in Europe and printed the Gutenberg Bible around 1455, changing how the world shared ideas.
• Who Was John Keats? — John Keats died of tuberculosis in Rome at 25, having written his six great odes in a single year. This explains his short life, his poetry and his fame.
• Who Was Joseph Stalin? — Joseph Stalin led the Soviet Union from the 1920s until 1953, industrialised the country and led it through the Second World War, ruling through terror.
• Who Was Julius Caesar? — Julius Caesar conquered Gaul, crossed the Rubicon and remade Rome's calendar and government, and was murdered by senators who feared he would be king.
• Who Was Kobe Bryant? — Kobe Bryant won five NBA championships with the Los Angeles Lakers and became known for the Mamba Mentality, on and off the court.
• Who Was Leo Tolstoy? — Leo Tolstoy wrote War and Peace and Anna Karenina, then abandoned literary fame for a radical moral philosophy that influenced Gandhi and the world.
• Who Was Leonardo da Vinci? — Leonardo da Vinci painted the Mona Lisa and The Last Supper and filled notebooks with anatomy and engineering, becoming the symbol of the Renaissance.
• Who Was Ludwig van Beethoven? — Ludwig van Beethoven wrote nine symphonies, 32 piano sonatas and the Missa Solemnis, much of it while deaf. This explains his life and legacy.
• Who Was Mahatma Gandhi? — Mahatma Gandhi led India to independence through nonviolent resistance, and his ideas shaped civil-rights movements worldwide.
• Who Was Mao Zedong? — Mao Zedong founded the People's Republic of China in 1949 and led it until 1976, bringing unification and the Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution.
• Who Was Margaret Thatcher? — Margaret Thatcher was the first woman to serve as British prime minister, leading the UK from 1979 to 1990 through reform, the Falklands War and division.
• Who Was Marie Curie? — Marie Curie discovered polonium and radium and remains the only person to win Nobel Prizes in two different sciences, a pioneer of radioactivity research.
• Who Was Marilyn Monroe? — Marilyn Monroe was the biggest star of the 1950s, the blonde bombshell of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and Some Like It Hot, who fought the studio system.
• Who Was Mark Twain? — Mark Twain, born Samuel Langhorne Clemens, wrote Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn and became America's most famous humorist.
• Who Was Maya Angelou? — Maya Angelou was a poet, memoirist and civil rights activist whose autobiography I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings made her widely read.
• Who Was Michael Jackson? — Michael Jackson, the King of Pop, made Thriller, the best-selling album in history, and changed music video, dance and pop stardom.
• Who Was Mirza Ghalib? — Mirza Ghalib (1797-1869) is the pre-eminent Urdu and Persian poet of the last Mughal era, whose ghazals on love, loss and doubt are still recited.
• Who Was Muhammad Ali Jinnah? — Muhammad Ali Jinnah was the barrister and statesman who led the All-India Muslim League and became Pakistan's first Governor-General in 1947.
• Who Was Muhammad Ali? — Muhammad Ali was the three-time heavyweight champion who called himself The Greatest, and the most famous athlete of the twentieth century.
• Who Was Napoleon Bonaparte? — Napoleon Bonaparte rose from Corsica to Emperor of the French, redrew the map of Europe, and left a legal code that still shapes law across the world.
• Who Was Nelson Mandela? — Nelson Mandela spent 27 years in prison under apartheid, then became South Africa's first democratically elected president and a Nobel Peace laureate.
• Who Was Nikola Tesla? — Nikola Tesla developed the alternating-current power system, the induction motor and the Tesla coil, making long-distance electric power practical.
• Who Was Osama bin Laden? — Osama bin Laden founded al-Qaeda in 1988 and organised the September 11, 2001 attacks, in which nearly 3,000 people were killed.
• Who Was Pablo Neruda? — Pablo Neruda was Chile's great poet, a Nobel laureate, a communist senator and a diplomat. This explains his poetry, his politics and his death.
• Who Was Pablo Picasso? — Pablo Picasso co-founded Cubism, painted Guernica, and spent 75 years breaking the rules of art — the most influential artist of the twentieth century.
• Who Was Pelé? — Pele is the only footballer to win three World Cups, the youngest winner, and the game's first global icon. This is his life, his goals and his legacy.
• Who Was Pope Francis? The People's Pope — Pope Francis, the first pope from the Americas and the first Jesuit pope, led the Catholic Church from 2013 to 2025 with an emphasis on mercy and the poor.
• Who Was Prophet Muhammad? — The Prophet Muhammad is the founder of Islam, the world's second-largest religion. This explains his life, his teachings and his legacy.
• Who Was Queen Elizabeth II? — Queen Elizabeth II reigned for 70 years, from 1952 to 2022 — the longest reign in British history. This explains her life, her reign and her legacy.
• Who Was Rabindranath Tagore? — Rabindranath Tagore was the first non-European to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, and the author of the national anthems of India and Bangladesh.
• Who Was Rosa Parks? — Rosa Parks was not a tired seamstress who acted on impulse. She was a trained activist and NAACP secretary whose bus refusal was a deliberate act.
• Who Was Rosalind Franklin? — Rosalind Franklin's X-ray image, Photograph 51, gave Watson and Crick the key evidence for the double helix. This is her life and the credit debate.
• Who Was Rumi? — Rumi, the thirteenth-century Persian poet of Konya, wrote the Masnavi and the Divan-e Shams, and became the most widely read poet in the world.
• Who Was Shane Warne? — Shane Warne took 708 Test wickets, bowled the Ball of the Century in 1993 and won the 1999 World Cup with Australia. This explains his career.
• Who Was Stephen Hawking? — Stephen Hawking was a theoretical physicist who showed that black holes emit radiation and wrote A Brief History of Time. He died in 2018, aged 76.
• Who Was Steve Jobs? — Steve Jobs co-founded Apple in 1976, was forced out in 1985, built Pixar, and returned to launch the iMac, iPod, iPhone and iPad. He died in 2011, aged 56.
• Who Was Thomas Edison? — Thomas Edison held 1,093 US patents, invented the phonograph and the practical incandescent lamp, and built the first commercial electric power system.
• Who Was Vincent van Gogh? — Vincent van Gogh produced about 2,100 artworks in a single decade, including The Starry Night and Sunflowers, and became famous only after his death at 37.
• Who Was William Shakespeare? — William Shakespeare is the most performed playwright in history, yet almost nothing is reliably known about his private life.
• Who Was William Wordsworth? — William Wordsworth launched English Romanticism with Lyrical Ballads and wrote The Prelude, the great autobiographical poem. This explains his life.
• Who Was Winston Churchill? — Winston Churchill led Britain through the Second World War and won the Nobel Prize in Literature, and his record on empire is still debated.
• Who Was Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart? — Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was a child prodigy who composed more than 600 works before his death at 35, defining the Classical era.
• Why Van Gogh Became Famous After Death — Vincent van Gogh died in 1890 almost unknown, and within a few decades his paintings were among the most loved in the world.