I have always been intrigued by the career trajectories of writers, artists, scientists and professors. Was it a life-long goal? A deliberate set of decisions or a random sequence of events? I posed this question to Frederik Logevall, a distinguished historian at Harvard University and a Pulitzer Prize winning author. He recounted a story about a TV series that he had seen when he was a young boy. It was a British documentary, titled World at War that aired in 1973. The movie had a profound effect on Logevall who remembers that after watching that film he knew that he wanted to become a historian. It is a 26-part series on the events leading up to and during the Second World War. Over the years it has been hailed as a singular achievement, relying on rare interviews, actual footage and an extraordinary delivery of the narrator Sir Laurence Olivier. Logevall encouraged me and my family to watch the series, if we could. Fortunately, it is freely available online (on........

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