Manfred Eigen

You keep picking Nobel Prize winners, I’ll keep running to Wikipedia to find obituaries for them. Manfred Eigen escaped from a Soviet prisoner of war camp in 1945 and walked on foot to the University of Göttingen, where he became part of the first post-Nazi student intake. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Chemistry […]

Rosamunde Pilcher

An unashamed populist writer, Rosamunde Pilcher cut her bones in the 1940s and 50s writing Mills & Boon romances under the pseudonym Jane Fraser (including the intriguingly/problematically titled Dangerous Intruder). She had a career as a writer of quantity rather than quality of sales until her 14th work, The Shell Seekers became a surprise success in the […]

Rudi Assauer

A steady-if-unspectacular defender during his playing career (342 appearances for the likes of Borussia Dortmund and Werder Bremen), it was after retirement that Rudi Assauer made his indelible mark on German football. His first run as sporting director at Schalke ran from 1981 to 1986, after which he left the sport to play the real […]

Julie Adams

Born Betty Adams, Julie Adams was a local beauty queen before she got the chance to join the Hollywood star system, becoming a contract player with Universal-International around the same time as Rock Hudson, Tony Curtis and Piper Laurie. Most of her starlet career was spent in the world of westerns, providing a love interest […]

Andrew McGahan

He may have been born in Dalby, Queensland, but few writers will ever be more associated with the city of Brisbane than Andrew McGahan. His debut novel, Praise, was a Bukowskian wander through the city at the turn of the 1990s – semi-autobiographical, and the country’s answer to Generation X or Less Than Zero. Future works included 2000’s […]

Clive Swift

Few actors were as different as the character they’re most associated with than Clive Swift. To the public, he was Richard Bucket in Keeping Up Appearances, the epitome of henpecked, downtrodden middle-of-the-middle class. In real life, he was a Shakespearean actor who wrote letters of complaint to newspapers when they called his alma mater (Clifton College Prep) […]

Ron Joyce

The DDP’s long-time Canadian theme team, Rushing to Tim Horton’s for Maple Donuts, is named after the country’s iconic coffee shop chain. It’s fitting, therefore, that they get a unique hit (and their first of the year) with the man who helped bring the world Timbits. Tim Hortons was set up by hockey star Tim […]