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Lila Kagedan: a woman rabbi, in the orthodox world? must be an error on June 3 – no, look here
Lydia Lili‘u Loloku Walania Wewehi Kamaka‘eha, remembered as “Lili’uokalani”, (born September 2 1838; died November 11 1917): the very last ruler of independent Hawaii before the US illegally annexed it – among the Supra Idesses on April 17 - bio here
Lev Borisovich Kamenev (né Rozenfeld) (born in Moscow on July 18 1883; died on August 24 1936, and surprisingly still in Moscow, not Siberia): 1st head of state when it was still the SFSR and not yet the USSR; purged on Aug 20: he was removed from his positions in 1926, and expelled from the party in 1927, before submitting to Stalin's increasing power and rejoining the party the next year. He and Zinoviev were again expelled from the party in 1932, as a result of the Ryutin affair, and were re-re-admitted in 1933. More here
Kara Avigdor ben Isaac (died 1439): the oldest surviving gravestone in Prague on March 11 - try here or here
Joseph Francis (“Buster”) Keaton: born on Oct 4; comparisoned on April 11
Thomas (Tom) Keats (1799-1818): younger brother of poet John Keats, who once wrote, in a letter to a friend, “Do you not see how necessary a world of pains and troubles is to school an intelligence and make it a soul?” - I wonder if he was thinking of Tom on Feb 23?
Christine Margaret Keeler (born February 22 1942; died December 4 2017): bringing down the government single-handed on June 5 - just needs a link to a tabloid, and I can’t resist going for the Daily Mail
William Francis Kemmler (born May 9 1860; judicially electrocuted on Aug 6 1890 - and what kind of a human being would create a website such as this?
William Kempe (Will Kemp) (born circa 1560; died circa 1603): playing the fool on March 15; performing in Elsinore on Sept 2; and speaking of Hamlet, speaking more than what was set down for him here
Francis Scott Key (born August 1 1779; died January 11 1843): “The Defense of Fort McHenry” on March 3
Seretse Goitsebeng Maphiri Khama (born July 1 1921; died July 13 1980) listed with the modern African greats on June 28; see my page for Botswana at TheWorldHourglass
Arghūn Khan (born circa 1258; died March 10 1291): the Marco Polo connection and his own quite extraordinary bio are on March 5
Mohammed ibn-Musa al-Khwarizmi: inventing al-Jabr (algebra), but then turning into an algorithm, on March 6; also see Abu Geber above; bio here
Franz Petr Kien (born January 1 1919; died 16 October 1944): among the artistic fellow-prisoners at Terezin on April 1
Carol Joan Klein (Carole King): jazzing up the clichés on June 20 – bio here
Frederik Willem De Klerk (born March 18 1936; died November 11 2021): Freed Nelson Mandela on Feb 11. Why is he not on the GER page. He ran apartheid South Africa did he not? and would have gone on running it, if he had thought that was politically viable, would he not? and yet he did surrender it, bringing Nelson Mandela from Robben Island for secret negotiations that were so successful apartheid didn’t simply end, but turned (alas only while Mandela was still alive) into a “rainbow state”.
Zoltán Kodály (born December 16 1882; died March 6 1967): a key figure in the career of Ernő Dohnányi on July 27
Theodor “Teddy” Kolleck (born May 27 1911, died January 2 2007): Mayor of Jerusalem on August 29; his bio here
Mary Jo Kopechne (born July 26 1940; drowned off the Chappaquiddick Bridge in the early hours of July 19 1969): a nobody really, a secretary who Teddy Kennedy was shagging, probably met when she was doing campaign admin for Bobby’s 1968 Presidential campaign: the full story here
Arthur Lee Kopit (born May 10 1937; died April 2 2021) - at least my xth ref to his Pulitzer Prizewinning play “Indians” - July 20 and Dec 6 in particular! For him, try here
Koresh (Cyrus): King of Persia who opens the Book of Ezra; BibleNet linked on March 5
Sergei Vladimir Korschmin: expert on Abramtsevo, and performing Mussorgsky on June 2: the link under his name on the blogpage is to his own website; and his Brisbane orchestra has stuff about him here
Jean de Koven: murdered by Eugène Weidmann on June 17
Karl Kraus (born April 28 1874; died June 12 1936): name-dropped by Peter Altenberg on Feb 21; compared with Jonathan Swift here, so he has to be worth reading
Stephan Krehl (born July 5 1864; died April 9 1924): taught Erwin Schulhoff in Leipzig on April 1
Gidon Kremer (born February 27 1947 in Riga, Latvia; still going strong in 2025): violinst, reviving Schulhoff on April 1; his own website here
Krivtsov: gets an obscure mention on July 18, and unravelling it is proving difficult: sites by the dozen insist on the Ukrainian poet Maksym Krivtsov, but this cannot be the one that Yevtushenko means, because “Wild Berries” was published in 1984, and this Kryvstov was thirty-three when he was killed on the Ukraine-Russia front in January 2024 (and he spelled it Kryvtsov). There is also another possible joke in the Yevtushenko which I only came upon while hunting down Krivtsov on the Internet: a 1910 short film about “The Life and Death of Pushkin”, directed by Vasili Goncharov with Aleksandra Goncharova and Vladimir Markov in two of the main roles, and, playing Pushkin – the actor Vladimir Krivtsov – click here for the film, here for the actor. And then, to make the matter still more playful, Pushkin wrote a poem with the title “Krivtsovu” (read it here though the English translation has him as Krivtsov without the final u), which, as per this essay, was hugely influential on the writing of Osip Mandelstam... but you will have to read “Wild Berries” to see where this is going... and anyway this Krivtsov was not a poet, but rather one of the Decembrists
Pëtr, or sometimes Pyotr Alexeyevich Kropotkin (born December 9 1842; died February 8 1921): giving Victor Serge the title for his memoir on Aug 20. Biologist view here; Marxist view here
John Kruesi the machinist, Thomas Mason the voice-over, on Nov 20, the date on which Edison claimed to have invented the phonograph
Elisabeth (Elsa) Kunwald: first wife of Hans von Dohnányi on July 27
Vilém Kurz (born December 23 1872; died May 25 1945) and his wife Růžena Kurzová (née Höhmová - born June 16 1880; died December 20 1938 according to wikipedia, but this link rather questions both her birth and death dates): taught Gideon Klein piano on April 1
Moshe Kuznetsov: a fictional character in the eleventh story in Varlam Shalamov’s “Kolyma Tales”on Aug 20
Leyb Moiseyevich Kvitko (born October 15 1890; executed by hanging on Aug 12 1952): another of the victims of the “Night of the Murdered Poets” (the “Yiddish Writers Plot”)
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