Sir Arthur Ignatius Conan Doyle was a British writer best known for his detective fiction featuring the character Sherlock Holmes. Originally a physician, in 1887 he published A Study in Scarlet, the first of four novels about Holmes and Dr...

Wilhelm II or William II was the last German Emperor (Kaiser) and King of Prussia, ruling the German Empire and the Kingdom of Prussia from 15 June 1888 to 9 November 1918. He was a grandson of the British Queen Victoria and related to many...

Henri-Louis Bergson was a major French philosopher, influential especially in the first half of the 20th century. Bergson convinced many thinkers that immediate experience and intuition are more significant than rationalism and science for...

Theodor Herzl, also known in Hebrew as Khozeh HaMedinah, lit. "Visionary of the State", was an Austro-Hungarian journalist and writer. He is the father of modern political Zionism and in effect the foundation of the State of Israel....

Anton Chekhov wrote both plays and short stories. He is generally listed in the first rank of Russian playwrights and in the high second rank (a notch below Pushkin and Tolstoy) as a writer of prose. His most famous plays include The Seagul...

Gustav Mahler was an Austrian late-Romantic composer, and one of the leading conductors of his generation. As a composer he acted as a bridge between the 19th century Austro-German tradition and the modernism of the early 20th century. Whil...

Douglas Ross Hyde was an Irish academic, linguist, scholar of the Irish language, politician and diplomat who served as the first President of Ireland from June 1938 to June 1945. He was a leading figure in the Gaelic revival, and the first...

Rudolf Steiner was an Austrian philosopher, literary scholar, architect, playwright, educator, and social thinker. He is the founder of anthroposophy, "a movement based on the notion that there is a spiritual world comprehensible to pure th...

Mehmet VI was the 36th and last Sultan of the Ottoman Empire, reigning from 1918 to 1922. The brother of Mehmed V, he succeeded to the throne as the eldest male member of the House of Osman after the 1916 suicide of Abdülaziz's son Yusuf Iz...

Field Marshal Edmund Henry Hynman Allenby, 1st Viscount Allenby GCB, GCMG, GCVO was a British soldier and administrator most famous for his role during the First World War, in which he led the Egyptian Expeditionary Force in the conquest of...

Aristide Joseph Bonaventure Maillol was a French Catalan sculptor, painter, and printmaker. The subject of nearly all of Maillol's mature work is the female body, treated with a classical emphasis on stable forms. The figurative style of hi...

Solomon Robert Guggenheim was an American businessman, art collector, and philanthropist. He started collecting the old masters in the 1890's. He retired in 1919 to become an art collector. In 1926, he met Hilla Rebay. In 1930, they visited...

Claude Debussy was a French composer. He and Maurice Ravel were the most prominent figures associated with Impressionist music, although Debussy disliked the term when applied to his compositions. He was made Chevalier of the Legion of Hono...

Théo van Rysselberghe, Belgian painter, was born in Ghent in 1862. He studied art at the Academies in Ghent and Brussels, and in 1881 exhibited for the first time at the Salon in Brussels. After the success of the French Impressionists exhi...

Sir William Henry Bragg was a British physicist, chemist, mathematician and active sportsman who uniquely shared a Nobel Prize with his son Lawrence Bragg – the 1915 Nobel Prize in Physics: "for their services in the analysis of crystal str...