Henri Bergson

Henri Bergson was born in Paris in 1859, the son of a Polish-Jewish musician and an English mother. At school he showed astonishing mathematical gifts, solving a famous problem, and his teachers expected him to become a mathematician, but he chose philosophy and entered the École normale supérieure. He taught in secondary schools for more than ten years, and at thirty published his doctoral thesis, Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness, known in English as Time and Free Will. At forty-one he was appointed professor at the Collège de France, where his lectures were wildly popular, the hall packed with listeners and society figures vying for seats. In 1927 he received the Nobel Prize in Literature 'in recognition of his rich and vitalising ideas and the brilliant skill with which they have been presented'. Gravely ill in his last years, he died in Paris under German occupation.