The present volume introduces the reader to a wide range of information about the men and women who won Nobel Prizes. Excerpts from their life histories, from their achievements in the sciences and arts, are interspersed with an array of anecdotes and chance occurrences which make for highly entertaining reading. 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 well-researched sketches - and the notion that if history is the essence of many biographies, the biographies of the Nobel laureates alone can throw a prominent light on the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first.