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"Only 14% of second-class male passengers escaped, so he certainly managed to beat the odds, and if he hadn't done so I wouldn't be here now," Nicholas Wade said of his grandfather, Lawrence Beesley, who survived 100 years ago today as the great ship sank. Bessley wrote a book about the tragedy. Wade reads excerpts for The Economist and writes in the New York Times about his own questions, one century later, about his ancestor's actions.