The present volume introduces the reader to a wide range of information about the men and women who have won Nobel Prizes. Excerpts from their life histories, from their achievements in the sciences and the arts, are interspersed with an array of anecdotes and chance occurrences which make for highly entertaining reading. The national anthems of three countries are the creations of Nobel laureates. While in office, the presidents of six countries were awarded Nobel prizes. It will attract attention that among the Nobel laureates one can find astronomers, aircraft pilots, performers of music, philosophers, revolutionaries, inventors, art collectors, mountaineers; not to mention the occasional gold digger, terrorist, lumberjack, fruit picker, and explorer of unchartered territories. It was a Nobel laureate who first addressed Mohandas Gandhi as "Mahatma" (Great Soul), anticipating the role that the future leader of the passive resistance movement would play on the Indian subcontinent. It was a Nobel laureate who identified and isolated the chemical species in coffee; that is to say, the species that give coffee its flavor and aroma. Between 1901 and 2002, more than seven hundred people were awarded Nobel Prizes. Covering a time span of 102 years, the book contains more than two hundred wellresearched sketches – and the notion that if history is the essence of many biographies, the biographies of the Nobellaureates along can throw a prominent light on the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first.