Move through the centuries and meet the lives lived in each.

Winston Churchill

1955 - Hyde Park Gate, London

Victory, ageing power, and the fight to shape the peace.

After the war, after the applause, after the second stroke — a prime minister reckons with what victory actually cost.

Mao Zedong

1959 - the Beijing study at Zhongnanhai (the desk where the provincial production returns are read), in the months following the Lushan Conference

Place story available

A chairman in his Beijing study reads the inflated production figures the provinces have learned to send up, treating reports manufactured to survive the recent purge of Peng Dehuai as administrative confirmation that the policy is working, while the state requisition apparatus takes grain at the reported rate from villages in Xinyang prefecture and elsewhere where the families are already starving.

W.E.B. Du Bois

1961 - Accra

Place story available

In Accra, an intellectual who spent a lifetime fighting for Black America explains why he left the country he tried to save.

John F. Kennedy

1963 - White House

Place story available

Pain management, speed, and mythmaking around youthful command.

In the White House, between pain and intelligence briefings, a president writes what the cameras were never allowed to see.

Dwight D. Eisenhower

1968 - Gettysburg, Pennsylvania

Place story available

Order, fatigue, and the afterlife of command in a disordered republic.

On his farm in Gettysburg, a general who commanded the liberation of Europe reflects on the wars that followed.

Charles de Gaulle

1969 - Colombey-les-Deux-Eglises

Place story available

Rejection, national embodiment, and the politics of post-power simplification.

At Colombey, having walked away from power a second time, a general asks whether France understood what he tried to build.

Bruce Lee

1973 - Hong Kong (Golden Harvest studios, Kowloon)

Place story available

Raymond has the morning's call sheet at the editing bay and the choreographer's apprentice is at the small stage with the third pickup's blocking, and I keep my hand on the storyboard because if Raymond sees the headache at the level of yesterday's storyboard he will postpone the third pickup to Friday, and the third pickup is the pickup Game of Death's nunchaku sequence requires before the Friday's stage call.

Elvis Presley

1977 - Graceland

Place story available

In the upstairs office at Graceland with the curtains drawn against the Memphis heat and Lisa Marie somewhere down in the house, I am setting my own account down on a yellow legal pad in the days before the tour opens in Portland, Maine on the seventeenth of August, still certain that the voice and the show will answer when I call them the way they always have, even as the body slows under me and the house closes in around the certainty.

Pol Pot

1977 - a concealed leadership compound in Phnom Penh (K-1 or K-3, autumn 1977; the figure operates under the name Pol Pot through Angkar, without public identification)

Place story available

A revolutionary operating under the concealed identity of Pol Pot reads the confession lists produced at S-21, treating names supplied under torture as administrative confirmation that the doctrine of category elimination must continue and that the party itself must be purged of the colleagues the manufactured confessions have just named.

Freddie Mercury

1991 - London (Garden Lodge, 1 Logan Place, Kensington)

Place story available

Mary has the morning's Garden Lodge accounts at the small table by the door and Jim is at the lower kitchen with the afternoon's instructions for the cat-staff, and I keep my hand on the EMI press statement because if Mary sees the statement before the press release's hour is settled with Roxy Meade Mary will telephone Brian and Roger before the press release's first paragraph is at the EMI office's printer, and the first paragraph is the paragraph Brian and Roger are to read in the morning paper and not in Mary's voice.

Princess Diana

1996 - Kensington Palace

Place story available

In the small writing room at the back of Apartment Eight, three days after the divorce was made absolute and the letter from the Queen?s office removing my style of Her Royal Highness went into the drawer of my mother?s old desk, I am setting down my own account of myself, on plain paper, while I still can, before the version of me being assembled in rooms I am not in finishes replacing the one I can still recognise as mine.